The cross-linguistic influence on L2 learners' ability to use morphosyntactic cues predictively. : A psycholinguistic study on German grammatical gender acquisition by Greek native speakers.

Abstract: German and Greek are both Indo-European languages that realize grammatical gender and indeed they have similar grammatical gender systems, they both realize three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). They pose some similarities concerning gender agreement as well. However, the lexical gender between these two languages differs a lot. The purpose of this study is to examine first, whether L2 learners of German with Greek as their first language are able to use German grammatical gender predictively. Secondly, it was also examined to what extent the differences associated with L1-L2 lexical gender are going to affect their ability to make gender-based predictions in their L2. An experimental condition providing lexical cues (i.e., numeral) as informative cues was added, so that a comparison between the L2ers’ predictive ability based on morphosyntactic cues compared to lexical cues, can be investigated. The research questions of the study were examined by means of a speeded picture-selection task. Gender Assignment Tasks and a proficiency test were also included to investigate the influence of proficiency and knowledge of grammatical gender on the L2ers’ ability to use gender predictively. Besides the L2ers’ group, a control group of German native speakers also participated. The results suggest that L2ers were not able to use grammatical gender in their L2 predictively across the board of the gender trials, although they did successfully use the lexical cues to predict upcoming words. Although proficiency did not significantly interact with L2ers’ performance at the task, their knowledge of grammatical gender did significantly affect their performance, leading to faster Reaction Times.