Imaz, A. & García Mayo, M. d. P.
Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea/Universidad del País Vasco, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
This paper examines the acquisition of gender agreement in English third person singular possessive pronouns (his/her) by Basque/Spanish bilinguals. Computational (White et al. 2004) and representational (Hawkins and Tsimpli, 2009) accounts within a generative framework disagree about the acquisition of uninterpretable features (i.e. grammatical gender in Spanish) by L2 learners, whereas interpretable features (i.e. gender in English and Basque) are claimed to be acquirable (Sagarra and Herschensohn, 2011). Previous research on Catalan/Spanish (Muñoz, 1991, 1994) and French learners of English (J. White and Ranta, 2002) show gender agreement errors. This study analyzed the L3 (advanced and intermediate level) English interlanguage of 34 Basque/Spanish bilinguals to investigate the possible effect of the internal structure of the determiner phrase (DP) and proficiency on gender agreement errors. Data from oral elicitation and picture description tasks revealed that (i) gender agreement errors were influenced by Spanish syntax, (ii) participants establish gender agreement with the possessee in both animate and inanimate nouns and (iii) advanced learners outperform intermediate learners, although the former still have production problems. Contrary to representational accounts our findings indicate that the acquisition of the interpretable gender feature poses persistent problems for L3 learners.