Copyright by Alisa Baron 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Alisa Baron Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Predictive Use of Matched and Mismatched Gender-Marked Articles in Spanish-English Bilinguals Committee: Maya Henry, Supervisor Lisa M. Bedore, Co-Supervisor Elizabeth Peña Zenzi Griffin Predictive Use of Matched and Mismatched Gender-Marked Articles in Spanish-English Bilinguals by Alisa Baron Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2018 Dedication I would like to dedicate my dissertation to my family for their unwavering support, motivation, love and understanding throughout my studies, which has culminated in this dissertation. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the undergraduate assistants and research assistant for their support throughout the process. Thank you to Karla Sanchez, Yarely Ramirez, Ivette Villarreal, Kathy Regalado, and Alice Regalado. Thank you to those who participated in naming agreement: Roberto Cofresí, Yarely Ramirez, Carlos Nye, Ivette Villareal, Maritza Jacobs, Leah Joseph, Stephanie Grasso, Scott Prath, Maximiliano Ramirez, Ellen Kester, Jissel Anaya, Katherine Johnson, Maria Mitidieri, Daniela Melo, Ricardo Nieto, Leandro Moreno Bello. Thank you for those of you who donated towards my HornRaiser campaign so that I could recruit children and adults to participate in my study. I would also like to thank Dr. Marcus Johnson from SR Research, for his continuous support during the programming and analysis stages of the eye-tracking task. Lastly, I would like to thank my dissertation committee Drs. Lisa Bedore, Zenzi Griffin, Maya Henry, and Elizabeth Peña for their informative feedback and support throughout the dissertation process. v Predictive use of matched and mismatched gender-marked articles in Spanish-English bilinguals Alisa Baron, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisor: Maya Henry Co-Supervisor: Lisa M. Bedore Abstract: Most behavioral research involving typically-developing children has been devoted to understanding language production processes, but there is limited information on language comprehension; thus, part of the developmental picture is incomplete. Although there is a growing body of literature focusing on production of grammatical forms for bilingual children, there is a critical need to understand how children’s comprehension skills develop in conjunction with production skills by understanding their language knowledge and language experience. With regard to grammatical class, articles are especially important because they precede nouns in most contexts in Spanish and therefore are used with a high frequency in all aspects of language. Articles should be studied in the language processing of elementary age children to understand what children attend to during language comprehension. In this study, the visual world paradigm was used to examine gendered articles using phonological competitors in trials with informative (different-gender grammatical trials), uninformative (same-gender grammatical trials), or incorrect (ungrammatical trials) articles in bilingual children and adults. Participants named common nouns and completed an eye-tracking task, a grammaticality judgment task, and a standardized vi vocabulary test in both English and Spanish. Bilingual children ages 5-6 and 8-9 did not show gender sensitivity in informative vs. uninformative trials but were significantly slower on ungrammatical trials. Bilingual adults showed sensitivity to gender and were significantly faster on informative trials relative to uninformative trials, which in turn were significantly faster than ungrammatical trials regardless of participants’ profile of current Spanish language input. Children may be merging their representation of articles in the two languages and not find the gender cue in Spanish to be necessary. Spanish, a gendered language and English, a non-gendered language, may be in competition during this developmental period. Bilingual adults are able to quickly and accurately process the incoming gendered information, and are therefore able to demonstrate gender sensitivity. vii Table of Contents List of Tables ...........................................................................................................x List of Figures ....................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Review of the Literature ........................................................................1 Grammatical gender ........................................................................................1 Using eye-tracking to study language processing ...........................................3 Gender-marked language in monolingual children .........................................4 Gender-marked language in bilingual children ...............................................7 Processing of gender-marked language in mono- and bilingual adults ..........9 Processing of phonological competitors in eye-tracking paradigms ............12 What do reaction times tell us? .....................................................................13 Theories addressing gender sensitivity .........................................................14 Current study .................................................................................................17 Hypotheses ....................................................................................................18 Research Question 1 ............................................................................18 Research Question 2 ............................................................................19 Chapter 2: Methods ...............................................................................................22 Participants ....................................................................................................22 Materials .......................................................................................................23 Standardized Measures ........................................................................23 Inventory to Assess Language Knowledge (ITALK) and Bilingual Input Output Survey (BIOS) ..............................................23 Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) .....24 Eye-tracking task .................................................................................24 Design .........................................................................................24 Stimulus characteristics ..............................................................27 Procedure ....................................................................................29 Article-noun pair naming task .............................................................29 viii Grammaticality judgment task .............................................................30 Statistical Analyses .......................................................................................31 Behavioral Measures ............................................................................31 Research Question 1 ............................................................................31 Research Question 2 ............................................................................32 Chapter 3: Results .................................................................................................34 Behavioral Measures .....................................................................................34 Research Question 1 .....................................................................................37 Visual Representation ...................................................................................38 Research Question 2 .....................................................................................46 Chapter 4: Discussion ...........................................................................................53 Behavioral measures .....................................................................................53 Research Question 1 .....................................................................................55 Research Question 2 .....................................................................................58 Phonological competitors ..............................................................................58 Theoretical Implications ...............................................................................60 Methodological Limitations/Weaknesses .....................................................62 Future Studies ...............................................................................................63 Appendix A ............................................................................................................65 Appendix B ............................................................................................................67 References ..............................................................................................................69 ix List of Tables Table 1. Participant characteristics in means and standard deviations ...............23 Table 2. Mean values (and standard deviations) for language measures .............34 Table 3. ANOVAs and pairwise comparisons of behavioral measures .................36 Table 4. Mean values