Misbehaved masculines: Incidental acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 German during reading

Abstract

The present study explores the early stages of incidental acquisition of grammatical gender during reading in German as a second language (L2) using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results show that advanced L2 learners are sensitive to gender agreement violations after as few as three to four exposures to a novel noun within a short text. The results also indicate that the acquisition of grammatical gender from syntactic context is gender dependent: Whereas gender violation effects were observed for feminine and neuter nouns, no such effects were observed for masculine nouns.