An electrophysiological study of gender agreement transfer in early language learners Katherine J. Midgley 1,2, Nicole Y. Y. Wicha 3, Phillip J. Holcomb 1 and Jonathan Grainger 2 1: Tufts University, Medford, MA; 2: Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive – CNRS & Université de Provence, Aix/Marseille; 3 : University of Texas at San Antonio introduction 80 RSVP sentences in English - read for comprehension (participants responded to questions on 20% of trials). Critical items – 80 familiar, relatively concrete, English non- cognate, nouns with 1-to-1 translation equivalents, 3 to 7 letters in length 40 items with masculine translations e.g. book, fish, wine – le livre, le poisson, le vin 40 items with feminine translations e.g. apple, mouth, shoe – la pomme, la bouche, la chaussure 2 conditions – OK and PV (perceived violation) OK : Mary dropped her apple on the floor. PV : Paul dropped his apple on the floor. Participants – beginning L2 learners L1 French - 14 participants from the Université de Provence right-handed native speakers of French second year students of English at the university level methods electrode montage A positivity can be observed between 400 and 700 ms post stimulus onset to our critical items. This positivity is more pronounced at anterior sites and over the right hemisphere. results discussion The results of this study provide some neurophysiological evidence of the influence of L1 gender on the processing of L2 items during sentence processing. L2 items whose gender in an L1 translation did not agree with the L2 possessive determiner showed greater positivity in a 400ms to 700ms time window. However the distribution of these P600-like effects, is not consistent with that of a P600 to monolingual gender agreement violations which has a posterior distribution. Cognitive Neuroscience April 2007 Supported by NIH Grants HD25889 and HD and by the CNRS, France contact: references Wicha, N.Y.Y., Moreno, E., Kutas, M. (2004) Anticipating words and their gender: An event-related brain potential study of semantic integration, gender expectancy, and gender agreement in Spanish sentence reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol 16(7), Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, Specificities of the French and English gender systems provided us with a way to test our question. French possessive determiners are gender marked and must agree with the gender of the noun they modify and not the gender of the anaphoric referent (as they do in English). Robert a vendu sa voiture sur internet. Robert sold his car on the internet. Our study explored the influence of grammatical gender from L1 on L2 during sentence processing. One possibility is that beginning L2 learners maintain lexical links from L2 to L1 items (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). If this is so, then in a sentence context these learners should show sensitivity to L1 gender. Simply, for an L1 French speaker would the English word “shoe” retain any of its gender information in an English sentence context? We recorded ERPs to simple, grammatically correct, English (L2) sentences. Half of the sentences contained critical items whose preceding possessive determiners (his, her) did not agree in gender with the gender of the L1 translation of the critical items. Any detected gender agreement violation could resemble a P600, known to be sensitive to gender violation in monolinguals.