2.1. Gender and number marking

Our point of departure is agreement relationships between nouns and modifiers, of which there are two in Spanish. For gender, all nouns are either masculine or feminine. Nouns and modifiers show a variety of endings, but the canonical inflectional morphemes for gender are -o for masculine and -a for feminine. In terms of number, the inflectional plural morphemes are -s and -es. There is no overt singular morpheme; singularity is conveyed by the lack of plural inflection. Examples (1)–(3) illustrate these agreement relationships.

Although number and gender marking both occur with nouns, there are various differences between the two. First, gender is generally recognized to have low communicative value (e.g., Alarcón, 2014; Gudmundson, 2013). This low communicative value is attributed, at least in part, to the fact that the gender of most nouns is arbitrary (e.g., Acuña-Fariña, 2009). Number has higher communicative value, as it changes the referent or meaning. Corbett (2001, p. 3–4) explains:

There is a difference in meaning between magazine and magazines (obviously concerning the number of them), which corresponds to a difference in form … The main part of the meaning of singular is that it refers to one real world entity, while the plural refers to more than one distinct real world entity.

Instances where gender changes the referent are much more limited (e.g., nuestro hijo ‘our_MASC son_MASC’ versus nuestra hija ‘our_FEM daughter_FEM’). The second difference pertains to traditional grammar descriptions in Spanish, and thus to a possible learning target for additional-language learners. In expressing gender, language users generally need to modify the morpheme of the modifier only. For instance, with the adjective meaning ‘black’, the masculine form is used in el coche negro ‘the_MASC car_MASC black_MASC’, and the feminine form is used in la camisa negra ‘the_FEM shirt_FEM black_FEM’. With number, however, language users typically need to add a plural morpheme to both the noun and the modifier to mark plurality, distinguishing them from singular forms and referents (see the examples in (4a–b)). A third difference pertains to the various ways in which learners may overtly mark gender and number in Spanish: There are more possible realizations of number expression, when compared to gender, in additional-language use. With gender we see two possibilities. Using the example of the noun meaning ‘movie’ in Spanish, the examples in (5a–b) demonstrate that it is possible for learners to use either a feminine or masculine modifier with this feminine noun.³ With the overt expression of the concept of plurality, however, plural marking can appear on only the noun (6a), on only the modifier (6b), or on both (6c), which results in three possible combinations of plurality for learners.⁴

Thus, although both are nominal agreement relationships, the expression of gender and number in Spanish differ in terms of both communicative weight and the overt marking of the two relationships. In part because of these differences, the acquisition of gender and number appear to be characterized by different learnability issues. This observation finds some support in prior research, which we discuss below, and suggests that number marking is worthy of further investigation.

The limited body of work on number marking has resulted in four important observations. First, studies have indicated that number marking is acquired before gender marking (e.g., White et al., 2004). Second, learners have exhibited improvement in the interpretation and production of number agreement as a function of proficiency, with learners becoming more targetlike as proficiency level increased (White et al., 2004). Additionally, it has been shown that knowledge about number agreement – but not gender agreement – may show development over the course of a stay abroad in the target-language environment. Using a grammaticality judgment task, Grey et al. (2015) found that participants made gains with number but not gender agreement during a five-week stay (cf. Gudmestad et al., 2019). Finally, research has indicated that the singular modifier is the default for learners (López Prego & Gabriele, 2012, McCarthy, 2008). Despite these findings, investigations on number agreement in additional-language Spanish have not yet explored the multiple factors that explain variability in use (see 6a–6c) in a single investigation.

As already mentioned, research on agreement between nouns and modifiers in SLA in general and on additional-language Spanish in particular has focused on gender, rather than number (e.g., Alarcón, 2014). For this reason, we look to the previous research on gender marking to inform our study of plurality marking. First, researchers have observed that learners may variably use feminine and masculine modifiers with the same noun (e.g., una_FEM pareja_FEM and un_MASC pareja_FEM ‘a couple’), including sometimes within the same noun phrase, as shown in example (7), taken from the current dataset.

Studies that have analyzed additional-language production in Spanish have observed that a range of factors are connected to learners’ variability in targetlike gender marking in oral and written language use. We highlight here four factors that are relevant for the present investigation. The most well-studied variable is noun gender, with research consistently showing that learners were more targetlike with gender marking when the noun was masculine (e.g., Finnemann, 1992; Montrul et al., 2008; White et al., 2004). Additionally, several studies have found that, for the factor of modifier type, targetlike gender marking was higher with determiners compared to adjectives (Alarcón, 2010; Bruhn de Garavito & White, 2002; Fernández-García, 1999; White et al., 2004). More recent research has examined distance between the noun and modifier and indicated that learners were more likely to mark gender in a targetlike way the closer the noun and modifier were to each other (Gudmestad et al., 2019, see also Finnemann, 1992; Keating, 2009). Lastly, in Edmonds and Gudmestad (in press) we analyzed written data and found that learners were more likely to exhibit targetlike gender marking when the noun was singular, compared to plural, which pointed to a possible connection between gender and number marking (see also Finnemann, 1992).

Another issue that has received quite a bit of attention in SLA research on gender marking is the role of L1 influence. Previous investigations have reached different conclusions on whether the presence of grammatical gender in a learner’s L1 plays a role in additional-language development of gender marking. Some studies have found that L1s with gender marking facilitate the acquisition of gender in an additional language (e.g., Franceschina, 2001), while others have observed no such effect (e.g., White et al. 2004). In contrast, there exists very little research on the importance of L1 influence on number-marking variability (see White et al., 2004, for work on additional-language Spanish and Chini, 1995, for work on additional-language Italian). In the current study, L1 influence is addressed insofar as we examine usage patterns of L1 speakers of French and English, all of whom are learning Spanish. All three languages – French, English, Spanish – show number marking on certain nouns and modifiers, although differences in the overt marking of number exist.⁵ Spanish traditionally marks number overtly on most nouns and modifiers in both the oral and written modalities. Prescriptively, French is similar to Spanish in writing, but in oral language most nouns and many modifiers are not overtly marked for number. Thus, in an example like le nouveau vélo [lənuvovelo] ‘the_SINGULAR new_SINGULAR bike_SINGULAR’/les nouveaux vélos [lenuvovelo] ‘the_PLURAL new_PLURAL bikes_PLURAL’, the plural marking on the determiner, adjective and noun are visible in the written form, but audible only on the determiner (see Ågren, 2008, for a study of the development of silent plural morphology in additional-language French). Finally, traditionally in English number is overtly marked on most nouns (spoon-spoons and goose-geese) but only on some modifiers in both modalities (e.g., demonstrative determiners this and these are singular and plural, respectively). Because most of this work on the influence of the L1 has been on gender and the fact that the three languages under consideration in our study all show differences with regard to nominal number marking, we begin to address in the current study the role that the L1 may play in learners’ variable use of number marking.

2.2. Variationist approaches to SLA

As the preceding sub-section demonstrates, little research has addressed number marking in additional-language Spanish, and of the research that does exist, it has yet to account for the variability in the use of number marking on nouns and modifiers. In the present investigation, we aim to further understand how additional-language learners of Spanish express number with a focus on how they mark plurality. This attention to plurality is motivated by previous studies that have indicated that plural morphology is the non-default (e.g., López Prego & Gabriele, 2012). Thus, we do not examine singular nouns with singular modifiers in the current study, as this combination typically shows no overt marking of number.

As was shown in (6), there are three possible expressions of plurality for noun-modifier combinations in learner language. In other words, each of the pairs in (6) can be argued to express the same function (i.e., plurality). One approach to understanding the variability among two or more ways of expressing the same function is variationism, and it is this approach that we adopt in the current study. Variationism is a branch of sociolinguistics that seeks to understand language variation and change, by accounting for the linguistic and social (extra-linguistic) factors that condition systematic and dynamic variation (Labov, 1972). The first step in a variationist analysis is identifying a linguistic structure in which a meaning or function can be expressed with more than one form. Examinations of the forms in variation generally involve assessments of the frequency of use of each form and probabilistic models that explain the factors that predict the use of a given form when two or more forms are possible (Tagliamonte, 2006).

Although this area of scholarship originally centered on native speakers, it was subsequently applied to additional-language learners. Much of the variationist SLA work has focused on linguistic structures that are variable among native speakers as well (e.g., subject expression in Spanish), meaning that researchers have investigated the additional-language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. To demonstrate what variationism can bring to the study of an additional language, we briefly discuss Linford et al. (2018), who examined subject expression in Spanish, focusing on the variation between personal pronouns and unexpressed subjects, as exemplified in (8a–b). They used a written contextualized task to investigate the additional-language development of subject expression during a six-week study abroad experience in Spain. They found that the frequency of selection of personal pronouns decreased and the rate of occurrence of unexpressed subjects increased during the stay abroad. Their multivariate analysis indicated that the same linguistic factors conditioned the selection of subject forms at the beginning and end of the stay abroad. For example, with the factor grammatical person, the participants were more likely to select a personal pronoun compared to an unexpressed subject when there was a third-person subject compared to a first-person subject. They also analyzed participants’ self-reported contact with Spanish and found preliminary evidence to suggest that this individual characteristic played a role in the development of variable subject expression.

In addition to work on sociolinguistic variation, a smaller body of scholarship has extended variationist conceptual and methodological tools to grammatical structures that are generally not variable among native speakers (e.g., grammatical gender in Spanish, Gudmestad et al., 2019, plural marking in English, Young 1991), resulting in new knowledge about how learners vary their use of linguistic forms that are seemingly not variable in the input they receive from native speakers. Thus, regardless of the linguistic phenomenon, variationist SLA has provided detailed explanations of the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that impact learners’ variable use and development (Bayley & Preston, 1996; Geeslin & Long, 2014; Tarone, 2007). We adopt this approach in order to offer a preliminary explanation for learners’ variable behavior in the marking of plurality on noun-modifier pairs in Spanish.

3.1. Method

3.2. Results

The frequency of use of each noun-modifier pair is available in Table 1. The plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pair was the most frequent, constituting over 90 percent of the data. Both the plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER and singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pairs occurred in the dataset, but they were less frequent, making up about 6.5 percent and about 1.5 percent of the data, respectively.

The next steps in our analysis led to the removal of two fixed effects. First, noun gender and animacy were strongly correlated, which meant that one of the two should be removed from the analysis.¹³ We chose to continue to investigate noun gender rather than animacy, because of previous work on gender marking that suggests that gender and number marking are connected in additional-language Spanish. Second, we found that L1 was not a statistically significant predictor of plurality expression, so we removed it from the analysis. Our final model included five fixed effects, in addition to the random effect for participant. The significant factors were program level, grammar-test score, syllable distance, modifier type, and noun gender. Given that three patterns of expressing plurality were attested in our data, we modeled the dependent variable with a multinomial logistic approach. The mixed-effects model compared a reference-point category of the dependent variable to each of the other categories. Since the plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pair was the most frequent noun-modifier pair, we selected it as the reference point. Therefore, in one model, plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER pairs and singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER were each compared to the plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pairs. Denoting the plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pair as the reference point also meant that we compared the pair in which the number marking on the noun and modifier matched each other against the two pairs in which there was a mismatch in plurality marking (i.e., one element was plural and the other was singular). These results are available in Tables 2 and 3, respectively. It is important to note that although we present the results in two separate tables in order to improve readability, they come from one model.

The nominal fixed effects also had reference points: They were beginning of the program (program level), masculine (noun gender), and determiner (modifier type). The continuous variables do not have reference points. The estimate in the tables shows the log-odds of using the non-reference point category of the dependent variable. A positive estimate denotes a higher likelihood of using either plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER (Table 2) or singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER (Table 3), whereas a negative estimate signifies a lower log-odds of using these mismatched categories, compared to the reference point category. The p-value indicates whether the effect is significant (α = 0.05; significance is when p < α). Details of the random effect of participant are not included due to space constraints. The McFadden’s R² revealed a moderate model fit (R²_McFadden = 0.2074; Smith & McKenna, 2013).

Beginning with the plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER versus plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER comparison (Table 2), we found that the participants at the end of their degree program showed a lower likelihood of producing a plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER pair compared to the participants at the beginning of the degree program. Regarding the grammar test, the higher the participants scored, the lower their likelihood of using a plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER pair. A negative parameter estimate was also found for the factor noun gender: The participants were less likely to use this mismatched pair when the noun was feminine. For the final two factors, the model showed that the learners were more likely to use a plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER pair when the modifier was an adjective and as the distance between the noun and the modifier increased. Another way of framing these results is that learners exhibited a higher likelihood of producing a matched plurality pair, compared to marking plurality only on the noun, in the following conditions: When the participants were at the end of their degree program, the higher they scored on the grammar test, with feminine nouns, with determiners, and the closer the noun and modifier were together.

The results for the singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER versus plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER comparison are available in Table 3. The effects for program level, modifier type, and syllable distance did not significantly influence the use of the singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER versus plural_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pairs. We found two significant effects for this comparison. The higher the participants scored on the grammar test, the lower the likelihood of using singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pair. The participants also exhibited higher log-odds of using a singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pair when the noun was feminine. In other words, the learners were more likely to use a matched plurality pair, versus only marking plurality on the modifier, the higher they scored on the grammar test and with masculine nouns.

When we compare the results for the plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER pair and singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pair, we see one similarity: Both showed a negative estimate for the grammar-test score. Stated another way, mismatched plural marking between a noun and modifier was less likely as the score on the grammar test increased. The findings for the other fixed effects differed between the plural_NOUN-singular_MODIFIER and singular_NOUN-plural_MODIFIER pairs.