Chapter 5
The second language acquisition of grammatical gender and number in Italian
This cross-sectional empirical study tested the ability of Anglophone L2 learners of Italian
(n = 87) to assign grammatical gender and number to a subset of isolated nouns drawn from a
written corpus of current magazine and newspaper articles. Italian native speakers served as controls
(n = 109). We first present a descriptive account of grammatical gender that outlines several
idiosyncrasies and complexities than may lead to difficulties for L2 learners, particularly English native speakers,
from a Feature Reassembly approach and a Minimalist perspective. We then discuss L2 learnability implications in light
of the results of a written, computerized gender assignment task (GAT) showing significant effects for gender and
number, ambiguous vs. transparent nouns, but not for suffixed vs non-suffixed nouns.
Article outline
- 1.Grammatical gender and number assignment in Italian
- 1.1Noun classes and vocalic endings
- 1.2Determiners as gender markers
- 1.3Compounds, grammatical homonyms and other idiosyncrasies
- 2.Grammatical gender and minimalism: Theory and L2 acquisition
- 3.Literature review
- 4.Methodology and research questions
- 4.1Research questions
- 4.2Participants
- 4.3Tasks and stimuli
- 5.Results
- 5.1Pre-test
- 5.2Gender assignment task
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
-
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