Dia: 20 de març del 2024
Hora: de 12:30 h 
Lloc: aula 52.121- 1a planta edifici 52. Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou - UPF i també en línia.

Resum: 
Speakers of ungendered L1s have persistent difficulty acquiring L2 grammatical gender agreement. We investigate what language experience factors modulate such difficulty and how digital gaming can help.
Experiment 1 examines whether age of onset (AoO), language proficiency and language use affect bilinguals’ reliance on lexical gender cues (gender of inanimate nouns) and syntactic gender cues (agreement computation) to predict adjectives. Early and late bilinguals matched in proficiency and current use and monolinguals looked at masculine and feminine adjectives while listening to sentences with gender-marked/unmarked determiners and nouns. Monolinguals predicted earlier than bilinguals, and early bilinguals earlier than late bilinguals. Monolinguals and early bilinguals relied on lexical and syntactic cues, but late bilinguals struggled using lexical and redundant syntactic cues. Higher proficiency and use facilitated predictions in early and late bilinguals, but proficiency and use affected attention to syntactic cues differently. In conclusion, a solid knowledge of lexical gender is essential, such knowledge strengthens with increased proficiency and use, rather than earlier AoO, and proficiency and use affect morphosyntactic agreement distinctly regardless of AoO. We discuss these findings considering linguistic, processing, prediction, and neurocognitive language models.
Experiment 2 is an in-progress study exploring whether game-based training using natural speech or artificial intelligence (AI) facilitates L2 processing of grammatical gender agreement. Beginning English learners of Spanish completed an eye-tracking pretest, played a digital game, and completed an eye-tracking posttest. The eye-tracking tasks were identical to those employed in Experiment 1 and they were included to determine whether learners were able to apply what they learned playing the game to new instances. In the digital game, participants heard a sentence with a verb lacking the suffix, moved a frog to a masculine or a feminine
platform, and received feedback. The sound files could be generated by a Spanish native speaker or by AI. The participants played the game 10 minutes per day during 10 days. The findings of this research project will inform models in phonology, lexical access, language processing, and language instruction.

About Nuria Sagarra's Research

Nuria Sagarra’s research straddles the domains of cognitive science, linguistics, and second language acquisition, seeking to identify what factors explain adults’ difficulty learning morphosyntax in a foreign language, with the aim of informing linguistic and cognitive models, as well as instructional practices. She investigates these topics using self-paced reading, eye tracking, and more recently, event-related potentials.