Lexical selection and gender agreement processing

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of lexical selection of adjectives on gender agreement in writing by late Chinese learners of European Portuguese (EP), with an online paradigm. Participants were asked to translate sentences (from Chinese to Portuguese) containing adjectives that ranged from easy to difficult, on a platform that recorded the writing process. A greater pause was observed in the difficult condition than in the easy condition at the critical position, i.e., just before the adjective. In addition, there were more errors in the difficult condition. These results suggest that when lexical selection is difficult it demands more resources from working memory (WM), and, hence, fewer resources are left for the agreement process, which results in more errors.