His or Her? Errors in Possessive Determiners Made by L2-English Native Spanish Speakers

Abstract

Native Spanish speakers commonly confuse third person singular possessive determiners when making gender agreements, which is considered an error-prone grammatical feature because there are syntactic differences in their use between English and Spanish. This study conducted an elicited production task to explore whether proficiency in English affects the correct use of his/her by Spanish speakers in speech production, whether participants make more errors depending on the gender match or mismatch between the possessor and the possessum in the noun phrase, and whether there are differences in the number of errors made due to the gender of the possessor. The results showed that sentences with a gender mismatch condition had higher error rates and that advanced L2 speakers made fewer mistakes than less proficient ones. However, proficiency did not mitigate the number of errors in sentences which required the use of the feminine possessive determiner, which is in line with the theory of the default masculine gender in Spanish. The study provides valuable insights into the challenges faced by native Spanish speakers when producing possessive gender agreements in English and highlights the need for more targeted instruction to address these issues in the teaching of English as a foreign language.