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Part of
The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun
[Studies in Bilingualism 63] 2022
► pp. 97–126

Chapter 5
The second language acquisition of grammatical gender and number in Italian

| University of Arizona
| Southern Methodist University

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.

Keywords: grammatical gender, formal features, Italian, Anglophone instructed learners
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
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.05ayo
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