todoELE

Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appear to need near-native proficiency to behave like native speakers. The question addressed here is whether sensitivity to grammatical gender in L2 learners of Spanish is modulated by the cognate status of nouns due to their heightened parallel orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic activation. Additionally, the role of transparent and non-transparent word-final gender marking cues was examined because past studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish are sensitive to differences in gender transparency. Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data were collected using the visual world paradigm. Participants saw 2-picture visual scenes in which objects either matched in gender (same-gender trials) or mismatched (different-gender trials). Targets were embedded in the preamble Encuentra el/la ___ ‘Find the ___’. The monolingual group displayed an anticipatory effect on different gender trials, replicating past studies that show that native speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in prenominal modifiers predictively. The learners were able to use gender information on the articles to facilitate processing, but only when the nouns had gender endings that were transparent. Cognate status did not confer an advantage during grammatical gender processing

The goal of this work was to explore the training, classroom practices, and beliefs related to pronunciation of instructors of languages other than English. While several investigations of this type have been conducted in English as a second/foreign language contexts, very little is known about the beliefs and practices of teachers of languages other than English. It is unknown whether recent shifts to focusing on intelligibility, as advocated by some pronunciation scholars, are borne out in foreign language classrooms. To fill this gap, instructors of Spanish (n = 127), French (n = 89), and German (n = 80) teaching basic language courses (i.e. the first four semesters) at 28 large (e.g. more than 15,000 students), public universities in the United States completed an online survey reporting on their training, classroom practices, and beliefs. Similar to ESL/EFL contexts, the results indicated that instructors believe it is important to incorporate pronunciation in class and that it is possible to improve pronunciation. However, the findings also indicated that instructors have goals which simultaneously prioritize intelligibility and accent reduction. Implications include the need for research on which pronunciation features influence intelligibility in languages other than English and for materials designed to target these features.