Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Even advanced Spanish speakers of second language Englishtend to confuse the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’, often withouteven noticing their mistake (Lahoz, 1991). A study by Antón-Méndez (2010) has indicated that a possible reason for this er-ror is the fact that Spanish is a pro-drop language. In order totest this hypothesis, we used an extension of Dual-path (Chang,2002), a computational cognitive model of sentence produc-tion, to simulate two models of bilingual speech production ofsecond language English. One model had Spanish (ES) as anative language, whereas the other learned a Spanish-like lan-guage that used the pronoun at all times (non-pro-drop Span-ish, NPD_ES). When tested on L2 English sentences, the bilin-gual pro-drop Spanish model produced significantly more gen-der pronoun errors, confirming that pronoun dropping couldindeed be responsible for the gender confusion in natural lan-guage use as well.