Publication Date

July 2010

Abstract

The goal of this study is to describe the acquisition rate for gender acquisition in Spanish and to show whether individual variability and language contact may affect this rate. The participants were intermediate second language Spanish (first language English) learners in the study abroad and at-home contexts over a 4-month period. The participants received grammaticality judgment tests coded for morphological class of the modified noun as well as attributive and predicative adjectives. Data were also collected on social behavior and language contact in Spanish and English in order to explain data outcome. The findings suggest that no difference exists between the two learning contexts and that social behavior and language contact abroad have minimal influence on acquisition rate.

Disciplines

Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics | Applied Linguistics | First and Second Language Acquisition | Spanish Linguistics

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