Bibliografía - género

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

In the current study I explore the relationship between epistemology and methodology through a reanalysis of production data on grammatical gender in additionallanguage Spanish that were analysed in Gudmestad et al. (2019). This reanalysis consists of a shift in the epistemology from the one adopted by Gudmestad et al., where gender marking, which occurs between nouns and both determiners and adjectives, is a unified linguistic phenomenon. In contrast, the assumption in the present investigation is that the acquisition of gender marking entails learning gender assignment and gender agreement, two different learning processes that are observable in language behaviour with determiners and adjectives, respectively. In order to reflect critically on the relationship between epistemology and methodology and specifically on its influence on the interpretation of learner data, I conduct a multi-step analysis that is guided by the differentiation between gender assignment, which can be observed on determiners, and gender agreement, which can be observed on adjectives. I also discuss how the interpretation of the findings can be impacted by the epistemology that guides the current study.

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Este trabajo examina las ideologías de género en los manuales de ELE más recientes. Tradicionalmente tachados de sexistas (v. Instituto de la Mujer, 1996), estos materiales didácticos han sido transformados en la última década gracias a una fuerte presión de la comunidad académica (Kuzmanovic Jovanovic y Djuricic, 2015), resultando en unas representaciones de género más equilibradas y equitativas. Incluso se ha producido un fenómeno de «feminización» de esos libros (Copley, 2017; Kuzmanovic Jovanovic, 2020). Sin embargo, se ha postulado que esta feminización es superficial y una consecuencia de la influencia de la ideología neoliberal, que impone «un ideal de personas independientes, emprendedoras y exitosas, tanto para hombres como para mujeres» (Kuzmanovic Jovanovic, 2020: 162). Este análisis parte de las conclusiones de trabajos anteriores que exploran las ideologías de género en los manuales de ELE (Kuzmanovic Jovanovic, 2016, 2020; Kuzmanovic Jovanovic y Djuricic, 2015, 2016), intentando encontrar el patrón detrás de las representaciones de mujeres en un corpus muy reciente (tres colecciones de manuales de ELE publicados en los últimos tres años por tres grandes editoriales españolas). Los resultados del análisis demuestran que, a pesar de una predominación de caracteres femeninos, en estos libros falta una variedad de experiencias femeninas, ya que la figura femenina predominante es la modelada según el ideal neoliberal. Así incluso la feminización de los manuales de ELE sirve no para promover una verdadera igualdad de géneros y justicia social, sino para mantener el statu quo social.

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