This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest showed that the PI group outperformed both TI and CM with respect to gender assignment on both a gender selection task and a writing task. The PI group also scored higher and responded faster than the TI and CM groups on a comprehension task that required accurate processing of gender-marked pronouns. However, differences between the three groups were not sustained on delayed posttests. These results extend the findings of previous research on PI (e.g. Benati, 2004) by showing that PI can be applied to target forms that are low in communicative value and must be learned item-by-item like grammatical gender in German. Results also lend support to psycholinguistic research that suggests that second language (L2) learners have difficulty acquiring grammatical gender because they do not process nouns together with gender information (Arnon & Ramscar, 2012).

本研究调查处理指令 (PI) 对德语语法性别和性别标记代词习得的影响。PI 与传统教学相比较，即传统的、以词汇为导向的方法，使用颜色提示 (TI) 和分类和记忆任务 (CM)。即时后测的结果表明，PI 组在性别选择任务和写作任务的性别分配方面都优于 TI 和 CM。在需要准确处理带有性别标记的代词的理解任务上，PI 组的得分也比 TI 和 CM 组更高，反应更快。然而，三组之间的差异在延迟的后测中并未持续。这些结果扩展了之前关于 PI 的研究结果（例如 Benati，2004）通过表明 PI 可以应用于交际价值低的目标形式，并且必须逐项学习，例如德语中的语法性别。结果还支持心理语言学研究，该研究表明第二语言 (L2) 学习者难以获得语法性别，因为他们不会将名词与性别信息一起处理（Arnon & Ramscar，2012）。