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The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun
[Studies in Bilingualism 63] 2022
► pp. 157–182

Chapter 7
The non-default gender category in additional-language French

| Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
| Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
| The Ohio State University

Whereas much research has examined the acquisition of grammatical gender in additional-language French, previous studies have all focused on targetlikeness. In other words, previous research reveals how accurate learners are in expressing gender and what factors may play a role in accuracy. Such research has found, for example, that learners of French tend to be less accurate in their expression of gender with feminine (as opposed to masculine) nouns and when the modifier used is an adjective (vs. a determiner). In the current chapter, we offer a complementary approach to the study of the acquisition of grammatical gender. We begin by establishing that masculine-marked modifiers are the default form in the corpus under study. Then, working within variationism, we seek to determine what factors influence the use of modifiers marked for feminine (the non-default) versus masculine (the default) gender, without focusing on accuracy. Our analysis is based on 5,992 instances of the expression of grammatical gender on determiners and modifiers in oral longitudinal data collected from 20 university learners of French. The data were modeled using a generalized linear mixed-effects model, which identified eight factors that influenced the use of the non-default gender category in oral additional-language French. The current study provides new insights into what impacts learners’ choice between modifier forms and, specifically, into what leads to the selection of the non-default (i.e. feminine) gender forms.

Keywords: French, additional language, accuracy, modifier use, grammatical gender
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1Grammatical gender in French
    • 1.2Analyzing targetlikeness: Errors and defaults
    • 1.3Targetlikeness and the acquisition of grammatical gender
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Data and participants
    • 2.2Data coding
    • 2.3Data analysis
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.07edm
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