Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Italian as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This study investigated the sensitivity to gender cues exhibited by L2 learners of Italian. The participants were 64 students in first-and second-year Italian classes at the university level. Three tests were given to ascertain the students' ability to assign gender based on morphophonological, syntactic, and semantic cues. Results showed that the students were sensitive to cues in the wordfinal phonemes that reliably indicate gender and implicational scaling demonstrated a clear order of difficulty among these endings. The students exhibited a low degree of awareness of the gender associations of certain derivational suffixes. When dealing with more than one cue, the students had no difficulty assigning gender when the cues were in accord, while coping with conflicting cues was more problematic, particularly when there was discord with natural gender. Nonetheless, in the majority of the cases, the students were able to use syntactic cues to override competing cues. While as a group, the students were reliant on a syntactic strategy, the implication scaling performed on the results revealed the presence of subgroups following different strategies, i.e., morphophonological or semantic. Clear scales of difficulty among the various combinations of cue types also emerged. Literature reviewIn languages where it exists, the system of grammatical gender is mastered by native speakers at an early age without the need for explicit rules. However, gender appears to be a difficult obstacle to surmount in an L2 for learners with an English language background (Andersen, 1984;Carroll, 1989;Delisle, 1985; Harley, 1979, in press;Rogers, 1987;Stevens, 1984;Surridge, 1993;Surridge & Lessard, 1984;Tucker, Lambert, & Rigault, 1969, 1977. Research has shown that L1 speakers do not depend on rote memorization in order to correctly assign gender to nouns; rather they have developed a sensitivity to competing cues that facilitate their choices (

Processing of grammatical gender in French as a first and second language: Evidence from ERPs

“…Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence Numerous linguistic studies (Andersen 1984;Ayoun 2007; Bruhn de Garavito & White 2002;Carroll 1989;Delisle 1985;Franceschina 2001Franceschina 2005Gess & Herschensohn 2001;Hawkins 1998, cited in Hawkins 2001Hawkins & Franceschina 2004;Myles 1995;White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-Macregor & Leung 2004) and a handful of psycholinguistic experiments (Holmes & Dejean de la Batie 1999;Guillelmon & Grosjean 2001;Oliphant 1998;Sabourin & Haverkort 2003;Sabourin, Stowe & de Haan 2006;Sabourin & Stowe 2008;Tockowitz & MacWhinney 2005), have examined how L2 learners represent and process grammatical gender. The majority of these studies have provided evidence that gender is represented differently in native and L2 speakers although this is qualified by various factors, reviewed in succession below.…”

Researching grammar learning strategies: Combining the macro- and micro-perspective

“…When it comes to research projects that focused only on grammar learning strategies, it is fitting to start with research into the assignment of grammatical gender to nouns in first and additional languages, a line of inquiry that has been by and large ignored by second language acquisition specialists (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith 1977;Tucker, Lambert and Rigault 1977;Cain, Weber-Olsen and Smith 1987;Stevens 1984;Oliphant 1997). These studies revealed that, depending on learners' sensitivity to different types of cues, grammar strategies could fall into three categories, namely: morphological (e.g.…”

Gender in Italian–German bilinguals: A comparison with German L2 learners of Italian

“…Mastery of gender in adult L2 acquisition has been extensively investigated for both Romance and Germanic languages (e.g., Chini, 1995, 1998; Oliphant, 1998 for L2 Italian; Dewaele & Véronique, 2001; Granfeldt, 2005; Renaud, 2009 for L2 French; Franceschina, 2001, 2005; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004; McCarthy 2008; Montrul et al, 2008; White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska & Leung, 2004 for L2 Spanish; Sabourin, Stowe & de Haan, 2006 for L2 Dutch; Matteini, 2010; Spinner & Juffs, 2008 for L2 German). In her longitudinal study on the acquisition of gender in Italian by speakers of different L1s, Chini (1995) distinguished a sequence of stages in the acquisition of gender agreement.…”