Differentiated Performance in Native and Instructed Nonnative Spanish: The impact of task demands and individual differences during performance with grammatical gender
Abstract
Adult language learners demonstrate extensive variation and are believed to rely largely on explicit knowledge and declarative memory, directly impacting how target language input is processed, represented, and retrieved. The overarching aim of this thesis is to identify and better understand the factors that are most important for adult language acquisition by examining how linguistic features, task demands, and individual learner differences may impact performance with Spanish grammatical gender. This research seeks to draw principled conclusions about what knowledge types and memory systems language users exploit as proficiency develops. 115 language users of Spanish from diverse language backgrounds, including native speakers (n=25) and late/adult instructed Spanish learners (n=90), completed a language learner profile questionnaire, a Spanish proficiency test, four experimental tasks with strategically manipulated conditions, and a metalinguistic awareness exit survey. Findings indicate enhanced late learner accuracy with frequent, grammatical, and masculine noun tokens and slightly enhanced native speaker accuracy with high-frequency tokens. Intermediate and beginner learner performance was found to be enhanced on self-paced and written tasks whereas advanced learners and native speakers performed better on speeded tasks and showed no stimuli modality effects. Individual differences in Spanish proficiency, metalinguistic awareness, and the Ideal L2 Self component of motivation produced the largest effect sizes among late learners. A slight typological multilingual learner advantage was also found that produced the greatest learner advantage on tasks conditioning online language processing. This thesis contributes to the domain of adult language acquisition by providing evidence that as global proficiency in the target language develops, qualitative patterns of sensitivity to linguistic and task features become more native-like as do quantitative measures of performance. Findings suggest that at lower levels of proficiency, learners strategically exploit their explicit linguistic knowledge to compensate for deficits in their developing implicit linguistic system. This research further contributes to our understanding of the individual differences that impact performance and makes a novel contribution to the field of multilingualism by elucidating the nature of the multilingual advantage for language learning. Findings show that advanced proficiency late learners are able to mirror both quantitative and qualitative native speaker norms of performance. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.