Article published in:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 3:2 (2013) ► pp. 150–179

Gender assignment and gender agreement in adult bilinguals and second language learners of French

| University of Hamburg
| Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin
| Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences

This paper is concerned with gender marking in adult French. Four groups of subjects are compared: German-French simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers) who grew up in France, German-French 2L1ers who grew up in Germany, advanced second language learners (L2ers) who are resident either in France or in Germany at the time of testing. The major goal of the study is to investigate whether differences in input conditions (acquisition in a minority vs. a majority language context) and differences in age of onset affect gender assignment and gender agreement in the same way or differently. Furthermore, we investigate whether successful acquisition of gender is dependent on influence from German. Two experiments, an acceptability judgment task and an elicited production task, are carried out. Results show successful acquisition of agreement in all groups. By contrast, gender assignment may be mildly affected if French is acquired in a minority language context or as an L2.

Keywords: gender, French, simultaneous bilingualism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gender assignment and gender agreement
  • 2.1Gender in French
  • 2.2Gender in German
  • 3.Acquisition of gender
    • 3.1Monolingual and bilingual acquisition in children
    • 3.2Gender marking in adult bilinguals
    • 3.3
    • 3.4Research questions
  • 4.Study on gender assignment and agreement
    • 4.1Participants and overall procedure
    • 4.2Acceptability Judgment Task
      • 4.2.1 Structure of the test and procedure
      • 4.2.2 Results
    • 4.3Elicited Production Task
    • 4.3.1Procedure and design
    • 4.3.2Results
    • 4.5The role of cross-linguistic influence from German
    • 4.5.1 Cross-linguistic influence in gender assignment
    • 4.5.2 Cross-linguistic influence in gender agreement
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 May 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.3.2.02kup
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