Spanish Grammatical Gender Interference in Papiamentu

Resumo

The aim of this study is to determine whether Spanish-like gender agreement causesinterference in speakers of Papiamentu (a Western Romance-lexified creole language) whoalso speak Spanish. Papiamentu and Spanish are highly cognate languages in terms of theirlexicons. However, Papiamentu lacks grammatical gender assignment and agreement, leading tocognate words with major morpho-syntactic differences. A total of 41 participants with differentlinguistic profiles (Papiamentu-dominant, Dutch-dominant, Spanish-dominant, and Spanish heritagespeaker-Papiamentu bilinguals) listened to 82 Papiamentu sentences, of which 40 contained aSpanish-like gender-agreeing element on the Determiner, Adjective, or Determiner + Adjective andwith half of the experimental items marked with overtly masculine (i.e., -o) or feminine (i.e., -a) gendermorphology. Participants performed a forced-choice acceptability task and were asked to repeat eachsentence. Results showed that Spanish-dominant speakers experienced the greatest interference ofSpanish gender features in Papiamentu. This suggests that in cases where speakers must suppressgender in their second language (L2), this is not easy to do. This is especially the case in highlycognate languages that differ in whether they realize gender features.