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Do learners who have mastered two gender systems prior to learning a third have an advantage in gender processing over those who have mastered only one gender system? To address this question, we recruited two groups of adult Polish learners of L3/Ln Swedish with and without prior knowledge of German. They completed a self-paced reading task in Swedish that involved two types of gender marking: the indefinite article, which is realised similarly in Swedish and German, and the definite suffix, which is uniquely present in Swedish. We found that while both groups were sensitive to gender agreement violations involving the indefinite article, only learners with knowledge of German showed sensitivity to gender agreement violations involving the definite suffix. Therefore, knowledge of non-native German conferred an advantage for the processing of dissimilar rather than similar gender marking. We interpret these findings in light of morphological transfer from German that consists in the employment of the existing morphemes and assigning them new grammatical functions. More broadly, the study indicates that the gender system in a non-native language rather than the native language, might be more helpful for the acquisition of a new type of gender marking in L3/Ln. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has documented cross-linguistic influence in L2 grammatical gender acquisition and use. However, it remains unclear what role previously learned languages play in gender assignment beyond L2. To address this question, we created a timed gender decision task with which we tested two groups of L1 Polish university students of Swedish as an additional language: 65 L2 English/L3 Swedish students, and 52 L2 English/L3 German/L4 Swedish students. Adopting a pseudo-longitudinal design, we tested individuals who had completed one, two, or three to four years of studies. Accuracy and response time data were submitted to Generalised Linear Models. The results show that L4 Swedish students did not outperform L3 Swedish students in terms of accuracy. However, L4 Swedish students assigned gender to nouns faster than L3 Swedish students, but only after one year of studies. The response time advantage of L4S students was attributed to the surface transfer of the German gender values into Swedish. Apart from the specific effect of German, the results point to the robust effects of gender congruency with L1 Polish and the persistent tendency to overgeneralise uter gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives: The study investigates the extent to which offline and online comprehension of reflexive possessive pronouns in L3 and L4 is modulated by previously acquired native and non-native grammars. Design/Methodology/Approach: Thirty-one intermediate to advanced L1 Polish learners of Swedish, who have also acquired German and English (L4 Swedish learners) or only English (L3 Swedish learners), completed a self-paced reading task and a grammaticality judgement task. The tasks targeted learners' sensitivity to possessor and possessee agreement violations. Data and Analysis: Reading times and judgement accuracy were collected and analysed using generalised linear models. Findings/Conclusions: In online comprehension, L3/L4 Swedish learners showed sensitivity to possessor and possessee agreement, which was affected neither by their proficiency, nor by their prior native and non-native grammars. In offline comprehension, however, they had difficulty deploying possessor and possessee agreement. Performance on possessee but not possessor agreement increased with advancing proficiency, indicating the persistent influence of L1 Polish grammar. Furthermore, L4 Swedish learners achieved an overall higher judgement accuracy than L3 Swedish learners. At the same time, L4 Swedish learners read the relevant regions longer than L3 Swedish learners, suggesting a speed–accuracy trade-off for L4 Swedish learners. Originality: The study investigates cross-linguistic influence in the comprehension of reflexive possessive pronouns in multilingual learners, which has not been explored before. It is also the first to provide evidence for a multilingual advantage in the accuracy of reflexive possessive agreement, albeit at the cost of reading speed. Significance/Implications: The study demonstrates that native and non-native grammars differently affect the offline comprehension of reflexive possessive pronouns in L3 and L4. The native language seems to have a more direct effect that consists in the employment of agreement mechanisms, while the non-native language has a more indirect effect, as it can increase learners' sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for L3/Ln (third or additional language) learners has not yet been addressed. The present study aimed to fill this research gap by examining the processing of gender agreement in intermediate and advanced L3/Ln Swedish among two groups of Polish native speakers: 30 L2 English / L3 Swedish learners, and 30 L2 English / L3 German / L4 Swedish learners. Participants were tested by means of a speeded grammaticality judgment task, in which they judged the correctness of indefinite noun phrases that either agreed or did not agree in gender. They also completed an untimed gender assignment task to control for their lexical knowledge of gender. Accuracy and response time data were submitted to Generalized Linear Models. The analysis shows that L4 Swedish learners process noun phrases faster than L3 Swedish learners, but only at the intermediate proficiency level; however, the groups do not differ in their judgment accuracy. This advantage is interpreted in terms of a surface transfer of similar gender agreement marking, which helps the learners automatize gender agreement processes earlier, but does not increase their sensitivity to gender-agreement violations. Moreover, the results accord with previous L2 studies in showing that learners of Swedish as L3/Ln develop sensitivity to ungrammaticality with advancing proficiency and benefit substantially from their gender assignment knowledge in processing gender agreement. Crucially, the present study provides preliminary evidence of a multilingual advantage in processing morphosyntactic features in L3/Ln. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines gender incongruency effects during gender retrieval in L3 Swedish learners, which are due to gender misassignment in L2 German. Twenty learners of L3 Swedish who had previously acquired two gender systems; one in their L1 Polish and the other in their L2 German, completed a speeded Gender Decision Task in Swedish and an untimed Gender Assignment Task in German. All noun stimuli were congruent in gender across the three languages (neuter → neuter, masculine and feminine → uter). Learners who erroneously assigned neuter gender to feminine but not to masculine nouns in L2 German showed higher error rates and longer response latencies in their attempts to retrieve uter gender in L3 Swedish. No interference was observed for neuter nouns. The present study thus demonstrates that incorrect gender representations in L2 German compete for selection with the target gender representations in L3 Swedish and that this cross-language interference is not always successfully resolved. Based on these findings, it is suggested that in the multilingual lexicon the connection of the uter gender node to the feminine gender node is weaker than to the masculine gender node. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that bilinguals process nouns that have the same grammatical gender in their two languages faster than nouns that differ in gender between L1 and L2. This finding, referred to as the gender congruency effect, has so far only been documented in L2. Hence, the aim of the present study was to examine whether late unbalanced bilinguals would also show gender congruency effects in their L1. To that end, 44 L1 Polish/L2 German bilinguals were tested in a gender decision task in Polish, which included gender-congruent and gender-incongruent nouns. The results revealed a robust gender congruency effect in L1, which was limited to bilinguals with very high L2 proficiency. This indicates that bilinguals activate grammatical gender information in L2 when accessing gender in L1, providing that they are highly proficient in L2. More broadly, the study demonstrates that foreign language knowledge can affect native language performance in exclusively native contexts. Finally, as a first attempt to examine grammatical gender access in Polish, this study shows that feminine gender is accessed faster compared to masculine and neuter, suggesting that the ending -a is the most reliable gender cue in Polish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender congruency effect, and so the facilitated retrieval of grammatical gender for translation equivalents of the same gender, has been documented in the recognition of isolated words in L2. Our study investigates whether this effect extends to word recognition in sentence context and whether it is modulated by gender transparency and L2 proficiency.Sixty late unbalanced Polish–German bilinguals completed a self-paced reading task with noun phrases manipulated for lexical gender congruency with L1 (congruent, incongruent) and noun-internal gender transparency in L2 (transparent, non-transparent). L2 proficiency was assessed through the Dialang test.Reading times on the noun were analysed by means of linear mixed-effects modelling.Results showed a gender congruency effect that was limited to transparent nouns and which was greater at lower L2 proficiency levels.The study is the first to investigate the gender congruency effect in the recognition of nouns embedded in grammatical sentences.The study shows that the presence of a contextualising sentence does not eliminate the cross-language effects of grammatical gender. Furthermore, it provides first evidence that individual noun-internal gender cues modulate the gender congruency effect. The findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between gender transparency at the micro-level and the degree of activation of gender values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input—including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input—affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who had acquired German from birth and German monolinguals, comparing on the one hand simultaneous bilingual children speaking German as a majority language with simultaneous bilinguals who speak German as a heritage language and, on the other hand, comparing heritage speakers of German who are simultaneous bilinguals with those who are sequential bilinguals. We studied their word order patterns in German, specifically the position of verb and negation, by dint of several tasks including acceptability judgment, forced choice, sentence repetition, and narrative tasks. The results revealed the effect of all three factors on word order patterns used by bilinguals between the ages of 7 and 13. The performance of simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers varies across the tasks. We conclude that they have problems inhibiting their stronger language in tasks that place higher demands on processor, leading to a non-target-like performance in their weaker language in producing narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the acquisition of German as the weaker language in the cases of German-Polish bilingual children. Focusing on negation and verb position, phenomena that have frequently been taken as diagnostic when distinguishing between the course of language development characteristic for first (L1) and second language acquisition (L2), we analyse experimental and productive data from six simultaneously bilingual children. Due to the constrained input, German is their weaker language. The results in Forced Choice and Grammaticality Judgements tasks are compared with the results of monolingual children. We show that in the area of negation the acquisition of German as the weaker language resembles L1, and in the area of inversion and verb final position the development of the weaker language is delayed. The striking difference between bilinguals' results in the experimental vs. productive tasks points to specific processing mechanisms in bilingual language use. In narrative contexts of the production tasks the language of the performance is activated, while the other is inhibited, which leads to a target-like performance. Structural properties of the stronger language tend to be activated, however, in the experimental tasks involving the weaker language, resulting in non-target-like responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the acquisition of verb placement in German as a foreign language at an advanced stage of development. The main objective of the investigation is to analyse written and spoken language production in terms of the use of subject-verb-inversion, verbal bracket, and verb-final placement in subordinate clauses. The results reveal a discrepancy between written and spoken language production with respect to correct usage of the verb placement rules. While correctness in the written production task exceeded 97% for all phenomena, the oral translation task generated less correct sentences, but only for inversion and verb-final placement. The non-target usage of inversion and verb-final pattern in spoken production points to processing problems when translating from Polish into German, which are further confirmed by lower accuracy for these two phenomena. At the moment of testing, the verbal bracket has already been acquired, which is in line with the universal developmental sequence in the acquisition of German syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]