Processing grammar to SLA: the example of Greek grammatical gender

Three factors are involved in the processing of grammatical gender in Greek nouns: semantics (sex), morphology (inflectional class — noun ending) and syntax (gender agreement between determiners–adjectives–nouns). No L2 Greek study has ever examined these factors in comparative tasks. This study examines the ability of L2 learners, whose L1 does not encode grammatical gender, to realise, process and integrate these gender cues upon the production of accurate gender agreement phrases by investigating the comparative role of morphological and syntactic information in gender processing of Greek as a second language (L2). The term ‘processing’ refers to the realisation of a noun’s gender class (lexical access). Results reveal that adult L2 learners of Greek are more capable of processing correctly and faster the grammatical gender of the presented novel nouns when they are provided with morphological and extensive syntactic information (determiner + adjective + noun suffix) than when they are merely provided with morphological and syntactic information (determiner + noun suffix). The present study also discusses the role of these gender-marked cues in the teaching and learning input of grammatical gender in lines with the ‘lexical gender learning hypothesis’ (Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C. & Fernald, A., 2012).