Three experiments using online-processing measures explored whether native and non-native Spanish-speaking adults use gender-marked articles to identify referents of target nouns more rapidly, as shown previously with 3-year-old children learning Spanish as L1 (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007). In Experiment 1, participants viewed familiar objects…

According to "noun-cue" models, arbitrary linguistic categories, like those associated with case and gender systems, are difficult to learn unless members of the target category (i.e., nouns) are marked with phonological or semantic cues that reliably co-occur with grammatical morphemes (e.g., determiners) that exemplify the categories. "Syntactic…