The Neurocognitive Underpinnings of Grammatical Gender Acquisition in German Among Adult Nigerian Learners: An ERP Study

This study investigates the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the acquisition of grammatical gender assignment in German among adult Nigerian learners using event-related potential (ERP) methodology, addressing a fundamental gap in the neuroimaging literature on German as a foreign language in African learner populations. Grammatical gender is a core morphosyntactic property of German that adult learners acquire with considerable difficulty, and electrophysiological studies of this acquisition process have been conducted almost exclusively with European and East Asian participants. The extent to which Nigerian learners' multilingual neural substrates, shaped by the processing of Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, or other tone languages alongside English, influence the neurophysiological signature of gender processing in German is an open and theoretically significant question. The study recruits 60 advanced Nigerian German learners and 20 German-Yoruba bilingual control participants, administering gender agreement violation tasks during high-density ERP recording. Analysis focuses on the amplitude and latency of the LAN and P600 components, which are reliably associated with grammatical gender processing. Findings reveal distinctive ERP patterns in the Nigerian learner group compared to published European learner benchmarks, with evidence of compensatory processing strategies associated with prior tone language experience. The study contributes to the neurolinguistics of grammatical gender, to multilingual language processing theory, and to the broader neuroscience of African language acquisition. Keywords: grammatical gender acquisition, ERP, German, Nigerian learners, neurolinguistics.