On native and non-native processing of grammatical gender violations: An ERP study

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De appel valt niet ver van het boom

On native and non-native processing of grammatical gender violations: An ERP study

Bregtje Joanne Seton

ReMA Linguistics Faculty of Arts University of Groningen

Supervisors:

Laurie A. Stowe Monika S. Schmid

31 March 2011

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Acknowledgements

The end of my time as a student of the Research Master Linguistics naturally goes with the appreciation and gratitude towards those who made it possible for me to finish after all this time. First of all, I would like to thank Laurie Stowe for taking me on as a thesis student back in 2009, while at the time I had practically no clue what I was getting myself into, and she was probably aware of that. I am very grateful for her patience and for the helpful comments in the writing process. I would also like to thank Monika Schmid for being the second reader of this thesis, and especially for the opportunities she has given me. Little did I know when I started on my thesis topic that it would actually lead me to a PhD position in the exciting project that I now work in. I am looking forward to working with both Laurie and Monika in the next four years.

I should probably devote a whole paragraph to Hanneke Loerts, the person who taught me almost everything there is to know about ERPs, grammatical gender, and the wonderful programme called Brain Vision Analyzer. Without Hanneke I would probably still be wondering what to do and how to do it. Not only did she become a colleague who I admire for what she does, she also became a very good friend who I admire for who she is. I really enjoyed working with her and I am happy our collaboration will continue for at least a few more years.

I would like to thank Joyce Haisma for being the voice of our experiment, Peter Albronda for his technical support at the Neuro Imaging Centre, and people at the Noorderpoortcollege, Alfa College and Islamic Centre who helped me find

participants. Of course, without participants, this thesis would not have been written.

Many thanks go to those who actually participated in this study and had to endure the EEG cap and especially the gel on their heads for almost two hours each.

Last but not least, I need to take the opportunity to thank my friends and family especially for tolerating me during my stressful moments. My parents (who probably thought I would never finish) and my brother have always been there for me, and I could not wish for a better family! My colleagues in room 245 and the other people in the corridor (especially Wander and Marjolijn), the secretariat, and my new colleagues at the Rode Weeshuisstraat have proven to be indispensable when it comes to writing a thesis. Finally, I am very grateful to my friends for sticking around: Annamieke,

Connie, Ellen, Gülsen, Irene, Janneke, Josbert, Joyce, Karin, Lisette, Margriet, Marjella, Marlies, Mirthe, Nanda, Natalia, Petra, Renske, Rika, Ruggero, Sieuwke, Sybrine, Tedi, Wolter, and everyone I forgot to mention: thank you!

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1. Introduction

The language functions of the brain have fascinated many people over the years. In the last decades of the twentieth century, more and more language studies started applying techniques that made it possible to look at brain activations. These studies tried to shed some light on how language is processed, but many of the mysteries have not yet been solved. Specifically bilinguals have received much attention over the recent years. Questions as to how the bilingual can keep both languages apart most of the time, and still sometimes be influenced by one of the languages while speaking the other one are typical questions that come up in the research field. Another frequently studied issue is the impact of age of acquisition: why does it seem to be more difficult for adult second language learners to become native-like compared to young children learning a second language?

In bilingual language acquisition research it often appears that bilingual children show a delay in comparison to their monolingual peers (Paradis & Genesee, 1996; Unsworth, 2008; Van der Velde, 2004). It is assumed that these bilingual children will catch up before adulthood, but whether and how much they catch up has not received much attention in the literature. In order to make claims about a critical period, it is important to investigate the whole spectrum of bilingualism, including those bilinguals who have acquired their languages simultaneously or early sequentially. For this sort of comparison one would preferably need to investigate a language feature that is difficult to acquire, and that even young children have difficulties with.

The present study will make an attempt to investigate a difficult feature of Dutch with young adults who grew up bilingually. The feature that will be used in this study is grammatical gender. Dutch grammatical gender is very arbitrary, because the gender of the noun cannot be predicted by its form. This makes it difficult to acquire.

An ethnic group that is specifically known to have difficulties with the Dutch grammatical gender system is the Turkish population of the Netherlands¹. This could be explained by the fact that Turkish does not have grammatical gender. It has been

1 Turkish first, second and third generation immigrants represent a large population in the Netherlands. As of January 1, 2010, the Turkish population in the Netherlands was the largest ethnic minority in the Netherlands at 2.31% (CBS Statline, 2010)

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found that among others Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (Blom, Polišenská, &

Weerman, 2008; Unsworth, 2008; Van der Velde, 2004) have more difficulties acquiring the Dutch grammatical gender system than monolingual children. However, no studies so far have investigated whether the bilingual children have caught up with their monolingual² peers by adulthood.

In the present study, a monolingual Dutch group and a bilingual Turkish- Dutch group between 18 and 27 years were tested in a study using event-related potentials to look at how the brain is activated when participants are listening to violations of grammatical gender in sentences. This activity in the brain is compared to activations in response to verb violations which are much more salient than grammatical gender violations. Moreover, Turkish, like Dutch, also has past participles which are distinct from the infinitive and those are the two Dutch features that were used here. The bilingual Turkish-Dutch participants were all either born in the Netherlands or had moved to the Netherlands before the age of 3. The results of the two groups were compared on both the grammatical gender violations and the verb violations.

A factor that has often been overlooked in language research is education background. Studies in linguistics normally investigate the language perception or production of university students. However, large bilingual groups in society frequently come from different education backgrounds. Since the experiment used for the present study will in the future also be carried out with various other groups of second language learners, education will be an important background factor that needs to be considered. Therefore, the sample of participants in the present study has been taken from different education backgrounds. Unfortunately, the bilingual Turkish- Dutch group that was tested was rather small. For this reason the effect of education was only statistically tested in the monolingual Dutch group. The effect of education in the bilingual group will have to be explored in the future when more participants have been found.

Chapter 2 will elaborate on some important background information. First of all, the concept of grammatical gender and its influence on both the Dutch and the

2 The term monolingual can be misleading in this context, as people in the Netherlands are never purely monolingual as they receive much input from English and sometimes also from local dialects. In the present study, the bilingual participants have received the same input as the “monolingual” Dutch participants. The only difference is that the bilingual group grew up with Turkish next to Dutch and the other languages. The term monolingual will thus be used in this context, but it should be noted that these monolinguals are not purely monolingual.

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Turkish language will be explained. Moreover, the relevant studies on first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition of grammatical gender will be discussed.

Consequently, the principles of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) will be clarified, followed by some important components that have been studied in the field. The final sections of this chapter will discuss the various studies on L1 and L2 processing of grammatical gender using ERPs, and how this lays the basis for the present study.

Chapter 3 will discuss the methodology of the present study, followed by the results in Chapter 4. Finally, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 discuss the results in relation to the studies that were discussed in Chapter 2.

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2. Background

2.1 Models of Language Acquisition

Second language development is a complex process which is influenced by many different factors. Age of acquisition, L1 and L2 similarity, amount of input, type of input, motivation, working memory, and cognitive functions could potentially all influence the development of one’s languages³. Trying to tease these factors apart is a difficult question which many researchers have attempted to do.

The perspectives that have been taken on bilingual language acquisition can be roughly divided into the view that takes innate language knowledge as a starting point (the nativists), the view that takes input as its starting point (the empiricists) and the view that takes a perspective in the middle of the other two (the emergentists). All three views have come up with helpful models that try to explain the processes involved in second language acquisition.

The nativist perspectives have called for second language acquisition models such as the Failed Functional Feature Hypothesis (FFFH: Yuet-hung Chan, 1997), the Shallow Surface Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006), or the Full Transfer/Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), which all predict that second language learners will have difficulties in one way or another with acquiring certain features. However, these models are all particularly focused on late L2 learners, and do not really make predictions on early acquirers of a second language. This probably stems from the assumption that early bilinguals will always be able to become more or less native-like, whereas late learners cannot, due to a so-called critical period. The end of this critical period is normally associated with the onset of puberty (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008; Lenneberg, 1967). Thus, many theories focus on late learners as early second language development is expected to be similar to first language development. Meisel (2007) is one of the few to make claims about early bilingualism in the nativist tradition. He argues that even early sequential bilinguals with an age of onset as early as the age of 3 will be less successful in acquiring their second language than simultaneous bilinguals (with an age of onset before the age of 3). Children with 2 first

3 One could extend this even further to day-to-day differences in language performance due to e.g. the weather, the amount of sleep, health, time of day, and so forth. However, this is beyond the scope of the present study.

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languages (2L1 acquisition) would in his view create two separate systems for both languages, whereas older children and adults would instead acquire their L2 through their L1.

From the emergentist side, a well-known claim that has been made comes from MacWhinney and Bates (1989) with their Competition Model. The main points of this model are that: (1) L2 features which are similar to the L1 will be easy to acquire, (2) L2 features which are different in the L1 will be difficult to acquire, because of competition from the L1, and (3) L2 features that are absent in the L2 will be easy to acquire, because there is no competition from the L1. This view settles in between the nativist and the empiricist view in that it takes into account that there is a stimulating environment which allows the learner to infer structures from the input. Thus, when there is competition from the input structures, new features will be difficult to acquire.

Theories which have looked at L2 acquisition from the empiricist perspective claim that language evolves solely through experience, and that input will be the most important factor contributing to whether a specific feature is acquired (Tomasello, 2003). Because of the input factor, it is predicted that simultaneous bilingual children will have a lag in language development because their input time is divided between the two languages and thus the amount of input for one language is less than that which a monolingual child receives (Paradis & Genesee, 1996). However, this lag in development is debated in studies on early bilingual (simultaneous and early sequential) acquisition (Gathercole, 2002; Marchman, Martínez-Sussmann, & Dale, 2004; Nicoladis, Palmer, & Marentette, 2007).

The issue which is at stake here is not necessarily whether language development matches any specific account in linguistics, but whether there is any model which can predict early language development and the question whether early bilinguals will ever completely become native-like. Meisel (2007) would in the nativist tradition predict that early bilinguals acquiring their two languages simultaneously (with the onset of both languages before the age of 3) should outperform early bilinguals acquiring their two languages sequentially (with the onset of the L2 after the age of 3). According to the emergentist views, even early bilinguals might show differences with monolingual native speakers on those features that are competing in the two languages. On the other hand, the empiricists would explain a potential difference by lack of input.

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In order to investigate the second language processing, many researchers have begun to do this by means of grammatical gender. This feature is suitable for second language research, since it may or may not be present in a language, and if present it may vary from a completely opaque to a very clear-cut system. The following section will explain the concept of grammatical gender in more detail.

2.2 Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender can be defined as "classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words" (Hockett, 1958, p. 231) or as "a system in which the class to which a noun is assigned is reflected in the forms that are taken by other elements syntactically related to it" (Matthews, 1997, p. 248). This means that grammatical gender is on the one hand about assignment, i.e. a noun is assigned to a certain class of nouns, and on the other hand it is about agreement, i.e. agreement of the surrounding words with the specific noun on the basis of the class to which this noun has been assigned. In a language that has gender⁴, nouns have an inherent property that determines the gender, but other words surrounding it may also have to agree in gender. These surrounding words may be articles, pronouns, adjectives, or even verbs. For example, in Dutch, when a noun is preceded by a definite article, it will either be de or het, depending on the gender of the noun.

To a certain extent, the grammatical gender system of many languages shows overlap with the natural or semantic gender of words. The gender of a noun meaning man will often be masculine, and that of a noun meaning woman will often be feminine.

However, in many cases, grammatical gender will not reflect the natural gender, as for example the grammatical gender of the German word Mädchen (girl) is neuter, whereas the natural or semantic gender of this word is feminine.

Moreover, if one language has grammatical gender, it does not have to mean that the gender of the nouns is exactly the same as the gender of the same nouns in another language, because it is arbitrary in many cases. For example, in Dutch the word for table (tafel) is masculine, whereas in French the word table is feminine. For some languages, the gender system is overt and can be predicted by the orthographic form of the noun. For example, in Spanish most feminine nouns end in –a, which means that

4 In the remainder of this paper, the word gender will be used to denote grammatical gender.

Wherever natural or semantic gender is meant, this will explicitly be mentioned.

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they go with feminine articles, pronouns, and adjectives. Likewise, when Spanish nouns end in –o, they are usually masculine, and take the masculine form of articles, pronouns, and adjectives. In contrast to the overt systems, other languages have a covert system, with nouns that do not predict their own gender. Dutch is one of these languages that have an opaque gender system which seems very arbitrary. Finally, there are also languages which may not have a grammatical gender system at all, as for example is the case in Turkish.

The opaqueness or arbitrariness of a particular gender system will probably influence the ease with which it is acquired. Overt gender systems will probably be easier to learn, whereas covert gender systems will be more difficult. The monolingual literature on L1 acquisition of grammatical gender supports this view in that Dutch children are generally late with acquiring the definite determiners and the adjective distinction with the indefinite determiner (e.g. Van der Velde, 2004). Moreover, relating back to the theories which were discussed in Chapter 2.1, ease of acquisition in the L2 may also be influenced by the gender system in the L1. The following sections will discuss the gender system of Dutch more extensively, and will briefly touch upon the lack of grammatical gender in Turkish.

2.2.1 The Dutch Gender system

The Dutch language as it is spoken in the Netherlands has two grammatical genders, common and neuter. Being a Germanic language, it used to consist of three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. The masculine and feminine genders have collapsed into what is now called the common gender. This distinction between masculine and feminine has mostly disappeared from the Dutch language, with exceptions in Flemish and some southern dialects. However, in many dictionaries, the distinction is still maintained by giving the gender of the noun (v. for feminine, m. for masculine, n. for neuter), as an attempt of the Dutch Taalunie (the Dutch language union which tries to prescriptively regulate the Dutch language in the Netherlands, Flanders and Surinam) to preserve the three genders⁵.

5 What should be noted here is that unlike articles and adjectives, pronouns that refer to a masculine or a feminine word do express the gender of a masculine or feminine form. Since the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns has only survived in dictionaries, hardly anyone uses the right pronoun when referring to a masculine or feminine noun, except where the natural or semantic gender is clear. Because of this and because of experimental constraints, pronouns will not be studied here.

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As mentioned in the previous section, gender is not visible on the noun itself in Dutch, but it does determine the form of the words appearing in its noun phrase, particularly determiners and adjectives. Even though it is not a very overt system, there are some systematicities that can be detected. For example, words that end in – heid, -nis, -schap are all feminine (common) words, and words that end in –aard, -aar, and –erd are all masculine (common), and most words with the prefix ge-, be-, and ont- are neuter words. These are some examples of the rules (and exceptions to these rules).

This being said, even with these apparent differences between some masculine and feminine words, the distinction has still ceased to exist, and thus the affixes do not help people in remembering whether nouns are masculine or feminine, unless these rules are learned explicitly. Even the different affixes for common and neuter gender are distinctions that most people will not be explicitly aware of. This is different from languages that have a more overt system, where people are probably more aware of the noun affixes.

As can be seen in table 1, the indefinite article is always een for both common and neuter words, which makes the input of grammatical gender even less evident. As a result of this, most adjectives⁶ that occur in the noun phrase between an indefinite article and the noun, will be the words carrying the gender in the noun phrase, e.g. een mooie boom (a beautiful tree) or een mooi huis (a beautiful house). Conversely, the definite article does contain gender information, de for common gender and het for neuter gender, whereas an adjective following a definite article does not bear any gender information, e.g. de mooie boom (the beautiful tree) and het mooie huis (the beautiful house). The present study will only look at this aspect of gender in Dutch:

noun phrases containing determiners and adjectives. The other gender distinctions in Dutch that can be seen in table 1 will not be taken into account, but are presented here for reasons of completeness.

Common gender occurs two or three times as often as neuter gender, depending on whether diminutives are counted as a separate noun or as a derived noun (Van Berkum, 1996). As can be seen in Table 1, diminutives are always of neuter gender, regardless of the gender of their stem form. If these diminutives are counted as separate nouns, then the ratio of common and neuter words is 2:1. If diminutives are not counted because their head can be a common gender noun, the ratio becomes 3:1.

6 There are a few exceptions to this rule, e.g. adjectives with a suffix –en such as houten or gouden (Van der Wal 1992)

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This could be an important reason for a switch to a default use of the common definite article de, which is often observed in non-native speakers of Dutch, and can even be detected in some native Dutch youth subcultures (Cornips, 2008; Nortier & Dorleijn, 2008). Given the trend that can be seen from the early Old Dutch to the present Dutch, it would not be surprising to see the gender system one day disappearing, as already happened to the English gender system long ago (Dekeyser, 1980). In a later section on L1 and L2 acquisition, this issue will be discussed further.

Table 1. Overview of the differences between common and neuter gender (adapted from Van Berkum, 1996):

Common Neuter indefinite article een boom

a tree een huis

a house definite article de boom

the tree het huis

the house adjective after indefinite

article een mooie boom

a beautiful tree een mooi huis a beautiful house adjective after definite

article de mooie boom

the beautiful tree het mooie huis the beautiful house diminutives het boompje

the little tree (diminutive) het huisje

the little house (diminutive)

plural de bomen

the trees de boompjes

the little trees (diminutive)

de huizen the houses de huisjes

the little houses (diminutive) demonstrative pronouns deze boom

this tree die boom that tree

dit huis this house dat huis that house possessive pronoun onze boom

our tree

ons huis our house interrogative pronoun welke boom?

which tree? welk huis?

which house?

indefinite pronouns elke boom each tree iedere boom every tree menige boom many a tree

elk huis each house ieder huis every house menig huis many a house relative pronoun De boom, die…

the tree, that… het huis, dat/wat…

the house, that…

To conclude this section, what is important about the grammatical gender system of Dutch for the present study is that there is a distinction between common (de) and neuter (het) nouns. For definite cases this is visible on the definite determiner (de

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boom/het huis), and not on an adjective (de mooie boom/het mooie huis). For indefinite cases, the gender is not visible on the indefinite determiner (een boom/een huis), but when faced with an adjective, this word marks the gender of the noun (een mooie boom/een mooi huis). It should be noted that the difference between de and het is lexically more salient than the difference of one phoneme or letter in the adjective ending mooi versus mooie. The common gender is clearly more frequent than the neuter gender, and may even serve as a default for native speakers.

This arbitrary and opaque system of grammatical gender of Dutch is very different from a language that has no gender at all, like Turkish. This absence of grammatical gender will be discussed in the next section.

2.2.2 The absence of a grammatical gender system in Turkish

Turkish, the official language of the Turkish Republic, is a language that does not have a grammatical gender system. The only gender marking that occasionally occurs is semantic gender, but even in pronouns and nouns that refer to persons (neighbour, worker, prime minister) there is often no distinction between female and male persons (Braun, 2001). Consequently, the sentence in example (1) can have several meanings:

(1) Kardeş-im, araba-si-na bin-di

sibling-POSS.1SG car-POSS.3SG-DAT enter-PAST

‘My sister got into her car’

‘My sister got into his car’

‘My brother got into his car’

‘My brother got into her car’

(example from Braun, 2001)

Braun (2003) gives a thorough description of the possibilities in Turkish to refer to semantic gender. Where it is necessary to address people (e.g. words for sir and madam) or refer to family ties, Turkish does distinguish between men and women (e.g. words for father and mother, brother and sister). Some influence from other languages that do have grammatical gender, has also brought some semantic gender distinctions into the Turkish language, normally on borrowed words. Arabic for example has a suffix –e to denote feminine gender. This suffix is now sometimes used in Turkish to refer to females, as in sahib-e (female owner) and müdir-e (female director). Slavic languages

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have brought the suffix –içe, which is used with words like kral-içe (queen) and imperator-içe (empress). Moreover, European loanwords like prens/prenses (prince/princess) and aktör/aktris (actor/actress) have been borrowed as a whole and are also used in Turkish. As for other reference nouns, Braun (2003) mentions that these words can be compounded with semantic gender words, for example kız çocuğu (female child = girl), erkek arkadaş (male friend = boyfriend), and bayan sürücü (lady driver). It should be noted that all of the above examples are only used to mark semantic gender, thus the new grammatical affixes in this case overlap with the natural gender of the words.

Apart from these few ways of marking gender (only natural/semantic gender), most nouns do not contain this overt information. Braun (2003) looked at nouns without gender information and investigated their semantic stereotype gender. Her research showed that people have a strong bias for a male interpretation of nouns, especially words for ‘police officer’, ‘street vendor’, or ‘taxi driver’, but also ‘villager’,

‘person’, and ‘someone’ are interpreted as masculine persons. On the other hand, there are nouns that receive a strong feminine bias, as the words for ‘cleaning person’ and

‘secretary’. This bias reflects the sociocultural differences within the Turkish community. Men are traditionally seen as representing human kind, and being the more public figures. Women on the other hand are placed below men and treated as a

‘special’ kind. This so-called Gender Belief System (Braun 2003) helps speakers of Turkish to disambiguate referential problems. Even though there is no overt way of communicating gender, it is still conceptually brought across.

The previous sections have discussed how the Dutch and Turkish languages differ with respect to grammatical gender. To investigate grammatical gender processing, many studies currently make use of an online technique of looking at brain activity or so-called Event Related Potentials (ERPs). This technique will be discussed in the following section.

2.3 ERPs

The present experiment uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure the electrophysiological reaction of the brain to particular stimuli. ERPs are obtained from an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. Electrodes that are placed across the entire scalp each measure an ongoing EEG signal, which consists of changes in voltage. The

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most common placement system that is used nowadays is known as the 10-20 system (Jasper, 1958). Because the size of the head will be different for every individual, it is important to make sure that the electrode sites that are measured are as comparable as possible. The 10-20 system locates the main electrodes at equal distances from each other. They are positioned in straight lines from the nasion to the inion, and from one ear to the other ear, as can be seen in the example in Figure 1. These points are easily determinable and are always just below or outside the brain region. The middle can be determined as Cz (or Central Zero), and from there the other electrode sites can be determined (Luck, 2005).

Figure 1. The international 10-20 system from the left (A) and from above the head (B). C = central, P = parietal, F = frontal, Fp = frontal polar, O = occipital, T = temporal

The raw EEG signal is amplified and filtered in order to get a measurement that is as noise-free as possible. The time of presentation of every stimulus can be marked with a trigger in the EEG signal, after which these triggers can be used to precisely cut and segment the data, leaving only the relevant epochs (i.e. time periods) which are time- locked to the stimulus. When many trials are averaged together, noise is averaged out, and the event-related potential (ERP) can be observed.

As opposed to imaging research, the ERP method does not give accurate localizations of where activity occurs in the brain. EEG measures the energy that is transformed from one neuron to another, over a period of time, and is thus used to look at activity over time. The fact that ERP gives such good temporal information makes it very suitable for language research. The activity that is measured in voltage

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can be positive or negative, which is usually denoted with a P for positive and an N for negative.

Several components of this signal have been found since the beginning of the 1980s, when EEG started to make its way into language studies. Very early components are said to be subconscious automatic processing and differ for visual and auditory stimuli. Since the present study is interested in auditory stimuli, only the early components of auditory processing will be discussed here. The early components for auditory stimuli can be seen in figure 2. Very early peaks (around 10 ms) are called the Brainstem Evoked Responses (BERs) or Auditory Brainstem Responses (ABRs), most probably reflecting activation from the auditory pathways. Then there is some midlatency activation between 10 to 50 ms poststimulus presentation, followed by a P1. Then there is an N1 component, peaking around 100 ms after the onset of the stimulus. These early components can in general only be detected when stimuli are presented non-continuously, since successive auditory stimuli will continuously elicit certain components and these components will overlap in the wave forms.

Figure 2. Early ERP components in auditory processing (From Holcomb & Kuperberg, 2001).

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After the early components, there is a component that is called the N2. It is not exactly clear yet what this component does. The P3 (often referred to as the P3b) or P300 component is a parietal positive component, which is thought to be elicited after an infrequent stimulus. Many studies have been carried out to investigate influence of various sorts of stimuli on the P300, but there is no consensus on what this component represents exactly. Donchin (1981) has proposed a context updating explanation. What is clear about the P300 is that it becomes larger when the stimulus is less probable and is test-relevant.

Important components for language research are the N400, the (E)LAN, and the P600. The N400 is a negative shift in voltage, occurring around 400 ms after the stimulus, which is higher for semantically unexpected words as compared to highly expected words (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980; Kutas, Lindamood, & Hillyard, 1984). The more unexpected the word is, the higher the amplitude of the N400 becomes. For example, the sentence: the thunderstorm was ironed elicits a larger N400 as compared to the shirt was ironed (Osterhout & Nicol, 1999). This is seen in Figure 3a. The N400 is often centrally and parietally oriented, sometimes slightly larger on the right than the left.

Figure 3. Example of an auditory experiment from Friederici (2002). Semantically anomalous words elicit an N400 (a), syntactic violations elicit a P600 (c) and may elicit an ELAN (b) or a LAN.

The (E)LAN stands for (Early) Left Anterior Negativity, which is a negativity in response to syntactic violations, occurring around 400 ms after the critical stimulus (or some people have found an ELAN around 200 ms (Friederici, Pfeifer, & Hahne, 1993;

Hahne & Friederici, 1999). It is said to differ from the N400 as it is a left lateralized effect on frontal electrodes as opposed to the bilateral N400 effect which is more

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posterior than the (E)LAN, as can be seen in figure 3b. Some studies have also found an ELAN or a LAN for gender agreement violations (Gunter et al, 2000).

The P600 is also a component that has been found to be sensitive to for example morphosyntactic violations (e.g. Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992; Osterhout & Nicol, 1999), and grammatical gender agreement violations (Gunter et al., 2000). The P600 is a positive shift that has an onset around approximately 500 ms after the presentation of the stimulus, and lasts until around 1000 ms (Figure 3c). Both Figure 3b and 3c show the brain response at different electrode sites to a syntactically ungrammatical sentence the blouse was on ironed as opposed to the grammatical sentence the shirt was ironed. The P600 effect also showed to be present in sentences containing both semantic and syntactic violations as in the cats won’t baking the food that Mary gives them (Osterhout, &

Nicol, 1999). The P600 is often thought to represent a process of reanalysis and repair.

Some researchers also claim that the P600 belongs to the family of the P3 (Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998; Donchin & Coles, 1988), and that since syntactic violations are so salient, it could cause a delay in the P3, resulting in a P600. The P600 is one of the most easily detected components as its amplitude is often large.

Thus, the most important components for language studies are the (E)LAN, the N400 and the P600. The N400 occurs around 400 ms after the presentation of the stimulus and is largest for semantically anomalous words and at centroparietal sites.

When the LAN is found, it occurs around 400 ms after the presentation of an unexpected incorrect stimulus with a left anterior distribution, in response to syntactic violations. The P600 also occurs in response to syntactic violations and is found around 600 ms after the presentation of an unexpected and incorrect stimulus. It show the largest effects in posterior regions.

The components that were discussed above are known to be elicited in monolingual processing. Studies on bilingual processing have sometimes yielded different results. For example, Osterhout et al. (2008) found that beginning second language learners show an N400 effect for syntactic violations, whereas later on this changes into a P600.

As mentioned above, grammatical gender violations will also elicit a P600 and may sometimes elicit an (E)LAN. On the one hand, grammatical gender is interesting to study because it varies in overtness between different languages. On the other, hand Event-Related Potentials are suitable to use as a method since it is very sensitive and will be able to detect small processing differences between groups of participants. The

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following section will review some of the studies that have been done with the acquisition and processing of L1 and L2 grammatical gender.

2.4 Native processing of grammatical gender: ERPs

Studies investigating monolingual, visual processing of grammatical gender have been carried out in various languages using ERPs. Native speakers of a language consistently show a P600 effect in response to grammatical gender violations in both overt gender languages (Spanish: Barber & Carreiras, 2005; Italian: Molinaro, Vespignani, & Job, 2008) and covert gender languages (French: Foucart, 2008; German:

Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000; Dutch: Hagoort & Brown, 1999; Sabourin &

Stowe, 2008; Van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort, 1999). The (E)LAN effect is a less frequent finding in these studies. A LAN was found in Spanish (Barber & Carreiras, 2005), in Italian (Molinari et al. 2008), and in German (Gunter et al. 2000). However, in French and in Dutch, the (E)LAN is not found for grammatical gender violations (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre, 2008; Hagoort & Brown, 1999; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008; Van Berkum et al., 1999). Barber and Carreiras (2005) found an N400 effect when stimuli were presented in isolation.

Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers (2000) conducted a study using a double paradigm in which they used German grammatical gender and semantic expectancy (high cloze versus low cloze). Their example sentences can be seen in (1) to (4) below.

(1) Grammatical – High Cloze: Sie bereist das Land auf einem kräftigen Kamel She travels theneuter landneuter on a strong Camel (2) Ungrammatical – High Cloze: Sie bereist den Land auf einem kräftigen Kamel

She travels themasc landneuter on a strong Camel (3) Grammatical – Low Cloze: Sie befährt das Land mit einem alten Wartburg

She travels theneuter landneuter on a strong Camel (4) Ungrammatical – Low Cloze: Sie befährt den Land mit einem alten Wartburg

She travels themasc landneuter on a strong Camel

The goal was to investigate the P600 effect as a function of semantic processing. Gunter et al. found a LAN and a P600 for the gender violations, and an N400 for low semantic expectancy. There was an interaction between the conditions in that the P600 effect was smaller for the gender violations in the low cloze condition. In the high cloze conditions the P600 started around 450 ms until the end, whereas in the low cloze

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conditions the P600 only became significant between 700 and 900 ms. This was interpreted as a delay in the processing of the syntactic violation due to the semantic overload. However, this goes against the findings of other studies who claimed that syntactic processing is independent of the N400 and cannot be influenced by it (e.g.

Osterhout & Nicol, 1999).

In short, the P600 is widely found for grammatical gender violations, whereas a LAN has only been found in some of the studies. Whether the P600 can be influenced due to semantic processing remains a question to be answered.

2.5 Non-native processing of grammatical gender: ERPs

There are a few studies that have looked at bilinguals or second language learners visually processing grammatical gender using ERPs. When participants show a P600 effect on the gender violations they are apparently aware that there was a violation.

Laura Sabourin (2003; see also Sabourin & Haverkort, 2003; Sabourin & Stowe, 2008) used ERPs to investigate the non-native processing of grammatical gender in Dutch through visually presented stimuli. She tested people with L1 German and L1 Romance language (either French, Italian, or Spanish), because German has a similar gender system to Dutch and Romance language have a gender system that is completely different from Dutch. Sabourin and colleagues found that participants with L1 German (similar gender system) showed a P600 while the Romance language speakers (different gender system) did not. Both language background groups had grammatical gender in their first language, but German is a language with a more similar gender system, which would be a reason why they did process the violations with a P600.

Another study was carried out by Alice Foucart (2008), who also used ERPs to investigate the non-native processing of grammatical gender. While Sabourin (2003) tested two groups of participants who both had gender in their L1, just similar or different to the Dutch gender system, Foucart’s experiment was in French with a group of participants who had no gender in their L1 (English), and a group of participants who did have gender in their L1, but completely different from French (German). She found some effects in the English-French group of participants (a native-like P600 effect in one experiment and N400 in another experiment), and no effects between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in the German-French groups. Foucart

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argues that speaking a non-gender language makes it easier to acquire the gender of the second language, whereas speaking a gender language makes it more difficult. For the native speakers of English it could be easier because there is no interference from the first language. The French gender system is also a bit more overt than the Dutch system, but most of the times the nouns are not marked for gender either.

Frenck-Mestre, Foucart, Carrasco and Herschensohn (2009) report on another ERP study with Spanish-French bilinguals, who were more proficient than the Foucart (2008) participants. In this study, phonologically variable and invariable adjectives were manipulated in order to look at phonological influence on gender concord. The authors found an increased P600 effect when adjectives were variable (i.e.

phonologically audible differences between the masculine and feminine adjective) as opposed to when they were invariable (i.e. just an orthographic difference between the masculine and feminine adjective). While these participants were more proficient, their L1 is also very similar to French, which may have been the reason why they did process gender violations.

Tokowicz and MacWhinney (2005) tested only a bilingual group of participants (English-Spanish), so the degree of similarity to monolinguals is not so clear. However, they contrasted constructions in the L2 that were similar, different, or unique as opposed to the L1. In this case the unique structure that was tested was a grammatical gender violation on article-noun sequences. They found that the largest P600 effect was found for these gender violations. The violations in the similar construction (auxiliary omission) also caused an increased P600, although they were not as large as the gender violations, and the different constructions (number agreement on determiner) caused no P600, rather an increased negativity for the violations. Although, Spanish gender is very overt, this result matches the results of the previous studies.

Recently, Lemhöfer, Schriefers and Indefrey (2010) tested German learners of Dutch on a visual experiment containing gender violations. On the items they knew (in a post-test), a P600 and a LAN was elicited.

Overall, the results of the studies discussed here seem to imply that speaking an L1 that has either no gender or a similar gender system will help acquire a gender system in the L2. This can clearly be explained by the Competition Model that was discussed in Chapter 2.1. However, the above studies all tested late learners of the second language, and one can question whether it will be possible for earlier bilinguals to acquire a grammatical gender system, especially when they have a completely

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different gender system or no grammatical gender system at all in their L1. The following section will discuss behavioural differences that have been found between different ages of acquisition and different first language backgrounds with the acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender.

2.6 Dutch Grammatical Gender in the L1 and in the L2

When children acquire their native language, they often have problems with acquiring a grammatical gender system. In Dutch, they typically overgeneralise the definite article de until they are around 6 years of age (Van der Velde, 2004), which is later than children in languages such as French and Spanish are thought to acquire their gender system. Dutch children also increasingly use the neuter determiner het, even for common nouns until the age of 6 (Blom et al., 2008). For non-native speakers of the language, grammatical gender is even more difficult to acquire, especially since Dutch gender is such a covert system.

Simultaneous or early sequential acquisition of Dutch next to another language makes it difficult for children to acquire the grammatical gender. Studies looking at early L2 acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch have found that bilingual children have more difficulties with the assignment of neuter determiners and adjectives than their monolingual peers (Blom et al., 2008) and late adult learners of the language (Blom et al., 2008). However, this difference between early and late bilinguals is not always found (Unsworth, 2008) and children might still catch up before adulthood.

Studies that have looked at age of acquisition in children have found that even bilingual children who were born in the Netherlands and grew up there from birth have more problems with the neuter determiner than monolingual children {{39 Hulk,Aafke 2006; 40 Hulk,Aafke 2006}}. Even Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) seem to outperform bilingual children (Orgassa & Weerman, 2008).

Studies that have looked at L1 background have found that children from a Turkish (- gender) background performed worse on the assignment of the neuter relative pronoun (dat) than children from a Moroccan (+ gender) background (Cornips, Van der Hoek, & Verwer, 2006). Other studies have not found a clear difference (Hulk

& Cornips, 2006) between gender and non-gender language backgrounds.

In a review on L2 acquisition of grammatical gender, Cornips and Hulk (2008) looked at factors which may play a role in acquiring the Dutch gender system. They

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investigated age of onset, length of exposure, quality of the input, and the role of the other language. From their review of studies Cornips and Hulk concluded that age of onset and length of exposure were the factors contributing most to the differences between studies. As for the role of the other language, there was no clear answer to what extent it influences the acquisition of Dutch gender. They also admit that quality of the input is difficult to measure. With their quality of input factor they assumed that L2 second or third generation children from ethnic language backgrounds receive a different input because the language of their parents and grandparents has never reached a high proficiency level. These older generations are said to overgeneralise the common definite determiner de (Cornips & Hulk, 2006; Cornips, 2008).

The studies with bilingual children all show that bilingual children have more difficulties with acquiring Dutch gender than monolingual Dutch children. Since bilinguals have half their input in one language and the other half of their input in the other language, this could also be expected. However, until adulthood they should have enough time to catch up with their monolingual peers. This is at least what Meisel (2007) would predict. Children with an L1 that has no grammatical gender at all should also according to the Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989) be able to acquire the grammatical gender system of Dutch. If there is an influence of quality of input, children who receive “incorrect” input from their environment may have more difficulties with the acquisition of the correct forms.

2.7 Rationale for the present study

The goal of the present study was to find out whether children who grew up as simultaneous or early sequential bilinguals in the Netherlands, will be able to show native-like processing of the Dutch grammatical gender system by adulthood. The studies that were mentioned above have only tested second or third generation children until they were 12 or 15. As far as I am aware, no study so far has looked at how these children perform when they reach adulthood. Some studies have used surveys or interviews to look at subculture or youth identity Dutch (Cornips, 2008;

Nortier & Dorleijn, 2008). In these studies, the authors argued that bilingual young adults of second or third generation immigrant families use incorrect forms of grammatical gender (in addition to accented speech) on purpose, while they do know the correct grammatical gender forms. This would mean that they have caught up with

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their monolingual peers, but only use the correct forms when needed. This implies that when someone does not produce the correct grammatical gender, it does not necessarily mean that this person does not know the correct form. Maybe these young adults would be able to detect incorrect gender concord. Instead of production, one should preferably investigate the processing of grammatical gender. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) should be able to show whether they process gender violations in a native-like way.

The studies on bilingual processing of grammatical gender that were presented above have all tested late learners of the second language. For these groups it seems that having no gender I the L1 does allow L2 learners to acquire the gender better than when the L1 has gender but is completely different. However, Turkish-Dutch children and Turkish adult learners of Dutch do seem to have difficulties with the gender system even though Turkish does not have gender at all.

For this reason, the present study compared a group of early bilingual young Turkish-Dutch adults to a monolingual Dutch control group. The Turkish-Dutch bilinguals are young adults who were exposed to both Turkish and Dutch from before the age of four (either born in the Netherlands or arrived from Turkey before the age of 4). This group of Turkish-Dutch bilinguals was compared to a monolingual Dutch group on an online EEG-experiment using auditory sentences that contain violations in gender. Moreover, since the studies on grammatical gender that were presented above used a visual presentation of stimuli, and since reading may disadvantage bilinguals to their monolingual peers, the present study used auditory stimuli to investigate grammatical gender processing.

A completely different issue that has not been investigated at to a great extent in previous research is the effect of education. Pakulak and Neville (2010) investigated this issue in an ERP study when participants listened to sentences containing phrase structure violations. Pakulak and Neville (2010) found a reduced P600 and an Anterior Negativity that was not only left lateralized (but bilateral) for the native speakers of English who had lower proficiency scores (and lower education background). In the present study education was taken into account as a factor in order to investigate both the behavioural results on a grammatical gender task as the online ERP results on the processing of violations. However, since the Turkish-Dutch bilingual group was very small, education was only looked at in the analyses of the monolingual group. For

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future studies with these materials the present study has provided a monolingual baseline.

2.8 Research questions and Hypotheses

The main research questions that arose from the literature that was discussed above are the following:

1. What is the influence of education on the processing of sentences containing grammatical gender violations?

2. Is the early development of a mixed grammatical system different from the development of a single grammatical system? And will Turkish-Dutch early bilinguals as young adults thus show a different pattern than monolingual Dutch speakers on an online grammatical gender processing task?

In line with the study of Pakulak and Neville (2010) on phrase structure violations, it could be expected that less educated native speakers will also differ from their higher educated peers on grammatical gender violations. If this is the case, it will have consequences for language studies on processing. Since it is normal to have participants from a university setting to generalise over the population, participants would have to be selected with more caution in the future. If there is no difference between education levels, then there would be no problem with generalising over a larger heterogeneous population.

When it comes to early bilingual processing, the age of onset of the early bilingual adults in the present study lies somewhere before the age of four, which means that it could be debated whether they fall into the simultaneous or early sequential category of bilingualism. According to assumptions made in the literature, these early bilingual young adults should have caught up with monolinguals of the same age. This would be in line with maturational nativist claims which suggest that learning a second language early is enough to become native-like. From the emergentist perspective that has been taken by Bates and MacWhinney (1989), Turkish- Dutch children should be able to acquire the Dutch grammatical gender system because there is no competition from the L1. From the input perspective, it could also be argued that early bilinguals will be able to become native-like, provided they receive enough correct input. Since it is impossible to measure how much correct input the young adults in the present study have received, it is only possible to hypothetically deal with this issue. Finally, it could be the case, as Cornips (2008) and

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Nortier and Dorleijn (2008) have suggested, that Turkish-Dutch early bilinguals do know the correct gender, but they decide not to use it because it is ‘not cool’. If this is true, the participants in the present study should be able to show an electrophysiological reaction in their brain waves when they detect gender violations.

When Gunter et al. (2000) carried out their study on German grammatical gender violations, they included a cloze probability factor and found that less expected nouns caused the P600 effect to be delayed and reduced. Cloze probability was also included in the present study to investigate the influence of semantic expectedness on the P600 effect. The expectation was that there would indeed be an interaction between these two variables in the P600 time windows.

Differences that might also come up in processing grammatical gender in Dutch is the difference between the indefinite and the definite determiner preceding a noun, and the presence of an adjective. Moreover, since there are more common nouns than neuter nouns in the language, the processing of these different genders may also differ from one another.

The present study will try to answer the two research questions that are mentioned here. Moreover, there will be an exploratory part of the study that will investigate the influence of indefinite versus definite determiners (with or without adjectives), and the influence of common versus neuter nouns. The next chapter will describe the methodology of the study that was used to try to solve the issues.

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3. Method

3.1 Participants

The participants in the ERP experiment consisted of two groups, one monolingual Dutch group and one bilingual Turkish-Dutch group.

28 Dutch participants and 11 Turkish-Dutch participants were recruited through e-mails, posters, and through messages on the Dutch social network website Hyves. 2 Dutch participants and 2 Turkish participants had to be removed from the analyses due to reasons discussed in Chapter 3.4. All participants filled in a questionnaire and indicated that they had no history of neurological problems or traumas, no epilepsy, and no language disorders. All participants had normal hearing and normal or corrected-to-normal vision. As an indication of right-handedness, 11 questions were answered on which hand was used for a particular action. Most participants were 100% right-handed according to this questionnaire, and only 5 out of 35 participants had a score below 100%. On average the right-handedness score was 98%, ranging from 82% to 100%. Participants were paid 15 euros for participating in the experiment and were asked to fill in a written consent form before participation.

The 26 remaining Dutch participants (15 female, 11 male) were all native speakers of Dutch, age 18 to 27 (mean age 22). Thirteen participants were students at or had been studying at higher professional education (Dutch HBO) or university level, whereas the other 13 participants were students at or had been studying at senior secondary vocational education (Dutch MBO). Participants were asked to rate themselves on languages learned on a five-point rating scale (1 being very bad, 5 being very good). These ratings will be discussed in the final paragraph of this section. All participants indicated they had learned English and German in school and most people also said they had learned French. Some of the participants spoke a local language variant (Gronings or Frisian). One person indicated she knew a little bit of Turkish, and another one a little bit of Mandarin.

The 9 remaining Turkish participants (5 female, 6 male) were either born in the Netherlands or had moved from Turkey to the Netherlands before the age of 3. They all had a double nationality, both Turkish and Dutch. Six participants were students at or had been studying at higher professional education (Dutch HBO) or university level,

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whereas the other three participants were students at or had been studying at senior secondary vocational education (Dutch MBO). All participants indicated they had learned English at school, everyone but one German, and 8 out of 11 French. Four participants said they had also learned Arabic, and one participant indicated that he knew some Bosnian, Yugoslavian, Russian and Armenian as well.

The Turkish participants also filled in questions about their proficiency and balance in Dutch and Turkish. Apart from 1 person, everyone indicated that they use Turkish on a daily basis. Five people filled in that Dutch was the easier language for them, three people indicated they were equally at ease with speaking either Turkish or Dutch, whereas one person indicated that Turkish was easier. However, all Turkish- Dutch participants rated themselves good to very good on both Dutch and Turkish.

When the native speakers of Dutch were compared to the Turkish-Dutch bilinguals on their English, German and French self-ratings there were no statistical differences in terms of self-rating, except for the German speaking and German listening. The native speakers of Dutch rated themselves higher on German speaking (Mdn = 3/reasonable) than bilingual Turkish-Dutch participants (Mdn = 2.5/bad to reasonable), Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z exact test = .95, p < .05, r = .16. Native Speakers of Dutch also rated themselves higher on German listening (Mdn = 4/good) than bilingual Turkish-Dutch participants (Mdn = 3/reasonable), Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z exact test = 1.11. p < .05, r = .19.⁷

3.2 Materials

360 experimental sentences were constructed and recorded in a soundproof studio.

Three different NP constructions were made: Definite determiner – Noun (DN), Definite determiner – Adjective – Noun (DaN), and Indefinite determiner – Adjective – Noun (IaN). Half of the sentences contained a target with a common gender, and the other half of the targets were neuter gender words. Furthermore, each stimulus consisted of a low cloze and a high cloze condition, in order to test the influence of semantic expectancy on the processing of grammatical gender.

7The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test is more appropriate in this case than a Mann-Whitney test, since the sample sizes are small. The exact significance is used as opposed to asymptotic significance, since sample sizes are small and poorly distributed.

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Each noun was used as a target four times in a low cloze or a high cloze and in a grammatical or an ungrammatical version of the sentence. Therefore, four lists were compiled with one occurrence of each target noun in each list, counterbalancing the different conditions. Examples of the sentences can be seen in Table 2.

Table 2. Example sentences in each condition with the English translation below each sentence.

Type of NP

construction Gender Cloze

probability Example sentence

High Cloze Vera plant rode rozen in de/*het tuin van haar ouders.

Vera is planting red roses in thecom/*theneu garden of her parents.

Common

Low Cloze Vera breit een sjaal in de/*het tuin van haar ouders.

Vera is knitting a scarf in thecom/*theneu garden of her parents.

High Cloze De bakker in ons dorp bakt het/*de brood volgens speciaal recept.

The baker in our village bakes theneu/*thecom bread following a special recipe

Det-noun (DN)

Neuter

Low Cloze Mijn buurvrouw maakt het/*de brood volgens speciaal recept.

My neighbour makes theneu/*thecom bread following a special recipe

High Cloze De mevrouw zette al het eten op de/*het grote tafel in het restaurant.

The woman put all the food on thecom/*theneu big table in the restaurant

Common

Low Cloze De mevrouw bracht de dozen naar de/*het grote tafel in het restaurant.

The woman put all the boxes on thecom/*theneu big table in the restaurant

High Cloze Bianca leest vol spanning het/*de nieuwe boek van haar favoriete schrijfster.

Bianca is reading theneu/*thecom new book of her favorite writer with excitement

Det-adj- noun (DaN)

Neuter

Low Cloze Bianca is al weken op zoek naar het/*de nieuwe boek van haar favoriete schrijfster.

Bianca has been searching for theneu/*thecom new book of her favorite writer for weeks.

High Cloze Sjoerd schrijft een lange/*lang brief aan zijn verloofde.

Sjoerd writes a longcom /*longneu letter to his fiancee.

Common

Low Cloze Sjoerd krijgt een lange/*lang brief van zijn verloofde.

Sjoerd receives a longcom /*longneu letter from his fiancee.

High Cloze Sandra is geboren en getogen in een klein/*kleine dorp in Limburg.

Sandra was born and raised in a smallneu /*smallcom

town in Limburg Indef-adj-

noun (IaN)

Neuter

Low Cloze Sandra gaat graag met haar moeder naar een klein/*kleine dorp in Limburg.

Sandra likes to with her mother to a smallneu /*smallcom

town in Limburg

On native and non-native processing of grammatical gender violations: An ERP study

De appel valt niet ver van het boom