ضمائم کلاسی ها دوره زمانی پردازش جنسیت و شماره را در زبان دوم نشان می دهد

This study investigates grammatical gender and number processing marked on clitic pronouns in native Spanish speakers and in late English–Spanish bilinguals using ERPs. Spanish clitic pronouns were chosen as a critical grammatical structure which is absent in English, and which encodes both grammatical gender and number. Number, but not grammatical gender, is present in English, making this structure a prime one to investigate second language processing. Results reveal a P600 effect in native speakers for violations of both gender and number. Late but relatively proficient English–Spanish bilinguals show a P600 effect only for number violations occurring at the clitic pronoun, but not for gender violations. However a post-hoc analysis reveals that a subset of highly proficient late bilinguals does reveal sensitivity to violations of grammatical gender marked on clitic pronouns. Taken together these results suggest that native-like processing is possible for highly proficient late second language learners for grammatical features that are not present in the speakers׳ native language, even when those features are encoded on a grammatical morpheme which itself is absent in the speakers׳ native language.