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Investigating Gender Assignment Strategies In Mixed Purepecha–Spanish Nominal Constructions, Kate Bellamy, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez
Investigating Gender Assignment Strategies In Mixed Purepecha–Spanish Nominal Constructions, Kate Bellamy, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez
Faculty Publications
Purepecha has no grammatical gender, whereas Spanish has a binary masculine–feminine system. In this paper we investigate how early sequential Purepecha–Spanish bilinguals assign gender to Purepecha nouns inserted into an otherwise Spanish utterance, using a director-matcher production task and an online forced-choice acceptability judgement task. The results of the production task indicate a strong preference for masculine gender, irrespective of the gender of the noun’s translation equivalent, the so-called “masculine default” option. Participants in the comprehension task were influenced by the orthography of the Purepecha noun in the -a ending condition, leading them to assign feminine gender agreement to nouns …