L3 Acquisition of Pronominal Possessors and Gender Agreement

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the acquisition of singular pronominal possessors (his/her) and gender agreement in third language (L3) English by first language (L1) Hungarian and second language (L2) Romanian learners and the extent to which animacy, task type and proficiency might affect it. The experiment is based on previous research by Imaz Agirre and García Mayo (2018), a comprehensive study on the acquisition of gender agreement and pronominal possessors in third language acquisition. This paper presents new findings by virtue of examining the third language acquisition of some agreement properties in the context of a novel combination of languages (L1: Hungarian, L2: Romanian, L3: English).