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Does learning Spanish grammatical gender change English-speaking adults' categorization of inanimate objects?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2010

ELENA KURINSKI  and
MARIA D. SERA
ELENA KURINSKI*
Affiliation:
Saint Cloud State University, St. Cloud
MARIA D. SERA
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
*
Address for correspondence: Elena Kurinski, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, St. Cloud State University, 113 Lawrence Hall, 720 Fourth Avenue South, St. Cloud, MN 56301-4498[email protected]
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Abstract

Second language acquisition studies can contribute to the body of research on the influence of language on thought by examining cognitive change as a result of second language learning. We conducted a longitudinal study that examined how the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender influences categorization in native English-speaking adults. We asked whether learning the grammatical gender of Spanish affects adult native English speakers' attribution of gender to inanimate objects. College students enrolled in beginning Spanish participated in two tasks repeatedly (four times) throughout one academic year. One task examined their acquisition of grammatical gender. The other examined their categorization of inanimate objects. We began to observe changes in participants' grammatical gender acquisition and in categorization after ten weeks of Spanish instruction. Results indicate that learning a second language as an adult can change the way one categorizes objects. However, the effect of Spanish grammatical gender was more limited in Spanish learners than in native Spanish speakers; it was not observed for all kinds of objects nor did it increase with learners' proficiency, suggesting that adults learning Spanish reach a plateau beyond which changes in categorization do not occur.

Keywords

language–thought relationscategorizationSpanish grammatical gendersecond language learninglanguage and cognition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 203 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported in part by a small grant from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota. The authors would like to thank Professor Carol Klee for her helpful comments and professional support. A portion of this work is based on Elena Kurinski's doctoral dissertation, “Gender Attribution by Adult Native English Speakers Learning Spanish”. We extend our thanks to dissertation committee members Francisco Ocampo and Timothy Face. Some of the data from this study were presented at the V International Conference of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association in Murcia, Spain (October 2006).

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