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It is often observed that Mandarin speakers make errors in producing English third person singular pronouns (he/she, her/his, etc.), even though they have explicit knowledge of gender difference in English third person singulars. Analysis of corpus data showed that production on third person singulars in English by Mandarin speakers made significant more errors on 'she' than 'he' (Wen, 2009). Some researchers attributed these errors to the lack of gender marking in third person pronouns in bilingual speakers' L1 (i.e. Mandarin does not mark gender in third person pronouns) (e.g., Anton-Mendez, 2010). It is plausible that Mandarin speakers may use L1 Mandarin production mechanism in L2 production, due to their less sensitivity to gender information in L1. This leads to their errors in 3rd person singular pronoun production. However, it is unclear whether this lack of sensitivity to gender information occurs at the conceptual level or lemma level in production (c.f. Levelt's production model, 1989). Our study attempts to understand the source of errors in the production of 3rd person pronouns by Mandarin native speakers.

Participants listened to stories that encoded gender cues through pictures. Then they were instructed to retell the story. The design was within-participant and counterbalanced, consisting of 3 different conditions: single male, single female and mixed gender. That is, the single male/female condition only involved male/female subjects in the stories while the mixed condition involved both males and females in the stories. The dependent variable was the error rate produced in each condition on the 3rd person singular pronouns. 32 proficient Mandarin speakers of English were tested. The results showed a main effect of gender complexity. That is, Mandarin speakers made significant less error in the single gender condition than the mixed gender condition. The significant effect of gender complexity suggested that proficient L2 English speakers did compute gender information at the conceptual level but somehow this information was not fully operationalized for output in production. Therefore, it is argued that the gender errors in English 3^rd person singular pronoun production were more a processing problem rather than a representation problem, at least for the highly proficient Mandarin speakers of English. This research provides empirical evidence for a default gender strategy in production by Mandarin learners of English and tentatively suggests that advanced Mandarin EFL learners still seem to make significantly more gender errors on the 3^rdperson singular pronouns than native speakers based on comparing the current findings and those in Wen (2009). Findings are discussed based on Levelt’s (1989) speech production model.

Dr. Xin Wang is a research fellow/lecturer associated with the Applied Linguistics Group at the University of Oxford. She received her BA in English in China, then both MA (TESOL/Linguistics) and PhD (Cognitive Science and SLA) at the University of Arizona, USA. She has extensive research and teaching experiences in universities in Singapore, USA and UK, including one year post-doc experience at Northwestern University and a brief stay at National University of Singapore as an assistant professor. Her major interests are in the psycholinguistic and neural perspectives of SLA and Bilingualism. Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition; Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Neurocase, Language Learning, etc.