This volume, a published dissertation, presents an empirical investigation into Spanish gender agreement among second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English. Although the acquisition of grammatical gender has recently been the focus of many studies within the generative paradigm (cf. White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-Macgregor, & Leung, 2004), Alarcón adopts a psycholinguistic approach to determine how certain linguistic variables contribute to learners' accuracy in this area of grammatical processing. In order to limit the scope of investigation, the author focuses on gender agreement between subject nouns and predicate adjectives.

The first chapter gives an overview of gender systems across languages and in Spanish. Here, Alarcón lays the linguistic foundation for her study, including a synopsis of Spanish noun morphology and the concept of noun class (i.e., whether there is a semantic basis for a noun's gender). The second chapter reviews previous studies on gender agreement in both L1 and L2 contexts. This literature review is comprehensive but can seem repetitive due to the chapter's organization. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with a clear summary of relevant findings as well as the research questions and hypotheses for Alarcón's study.

The study, described in detail in the third chapter, is clearly motivated and well designed. Based on the kind of psycholinguistic procedure used by Bock and Miller (1991) to elicit number agreement errors in L1 speech, Alarcón created a computerized task in which participants saw a sentence preamble containing a complex noun phrase such as el amigo del ingeniero es… “the friend-masc of the engineer-masc is… .” After the reader hit the continue button, the next screen showed two forms of an adjective (masculine and feminine). The participant then selected the adjective that agreed with the sentential subject. The ingenuity of the research design lies in the variables manipulated in the experimental sentences: noun class (semantic or nonsemantic), gender (masculine or feminine), morphology (overt or nonovert), and gender congruency between the two nouns in the preamble (matched or mismatched). In addition to these linguistic variables, the author administered independent tests in order to determine if vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, or both had an effect on learners' performance on the computerized task. The participants were three groups of learners (beginners, low intermediates, and advanced) and a control group of native speakers, allowing for an additional layer of analyses based on proficiency level.

The results presented in the fourth chapter focus on statistical analyses. These include t-tests (to compare accuracy means for the four groups), chi-square tests (to determine relationships between each linguistic variable and accuracy), correlations (to measure associations among grammar knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, and accuracy), and logistic regressions (to examine the power of each independent variable in predicting accuracy). The motivation for each statistical test is clearly explained, including the assumptions underlying each one. Given the complexity of the research design, the reader must turn to the last chapter to truly appreciate the patterns that emerge from the data. For all groups of participants, three variables significantly affected gender agreement accuracy: morphology of the head noun, gender congruency, and vocabulary knowledge. As predicted, accuracy was greater for nouns with overt morphological marking and when there was gender concord between the two nouns in the preamble (e.g., el pariente del psicólogo “the relative-masc of the psychologist-masc”). Vocabulary knowledge affected all groups of learners, but the effect became stronger with increasing proficiency. Alarcón interprets these findings as evidence that L2 learners and native speakers “use similar linguistic cues to establish correct gender agreement between a subject noun and a predicate adjective” (p. 88). Another important conclusion stems from the high accuracy rate of the beginning learners (75%) and the nativelike performance of the advanced group (94.8%), which lead the author to conclude that Spanish gender agreement does not constitute a learnability problem but rather one of surface mapping.

Overall, this volume presents a comprehensive study on gender agreement that will be an excellent resource for SLA researchers studying gender in Spanish or in other languages. It should also be of interest to graduate students who would like to familiarize themselves with the structure and organization of a well-written dissertation.