For this research, a 180-item grammaticality judgment task was administered (with items in random order) to each 53 subjects, and each item was evaluated for accuracy (Acc) and reaction time (RT). This yielded 180 x 53 x 2 = 19,080 data points. The data deposited here gives the means, for each subject, in 48 separate categories. The spreadsheet has 52 columns, including “subject” ID number, the subject’s “group” (1 = NS, 2 = HL, and 3 = L2), and two columns indicating that one subject’s RT data was an outlier, and therefore omitted from the analysis. For both accuracy (measured as a percentage in decimal form: i.e., 0.98 = 98%) and RT (measured in milliseconds), there are 24 data columns each. There is an overall score (for Acc and RT), a column for the score with each of the 7 linguistic variables, a column for each of the 4 combinations of Gender (masculine = Masc, and feminine = Fem) x Morphology (overt = Ov, and non-overt = Nov), and a column for each of the 12 combinations of Condition (C1 = congruent, C2 = incongruent adjective, and C3 = incongruent article) x Morphology x Gender.

The present study investigates whether advanced proficiency-matched early and late bilinguals display gender agreement processing quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of native speakers of Spanish. To address this issue, a timed grammaticality judgment task was used to analyze the effects on accuracy and reaction times of grammatical gender, morphology, and gender congruency of the article and adjective within a noun phrase. Overall results indicated no significant statistical differences between the native speakers and the two bilingual groups. Both early and late bilinguals displayed similar grammatical gender knowledge in their underlying grammars. A detailed examination of the congruency effect, however, revealed that the native speakers, not the bilinguals, displayed sensitivity to gender agreement violations. Moreover, the native speakers and early bilinguals pattern together in accuracy and directionality of gender agreement processing: both were less accurate with incongruent articles than with incongruent adjectives, while the second language learners were equally accurate in both agreement domains. Despite having internalized gender in their implicit grammars, the late bilinguals did not show native-like patterns in real time processing. The present findings suggest that, for high proficiency speakers, there is a distinct advantage for early over late bilinguals in achieving native-like gender lexical access and retrieval. Therefore, age of acquisition, in conjunction with learning context, might be the best predictor of native-like gender agreement processing at advanced and near-native proficiency levels.

E-Prime, 2.0.8.32