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

Abstract

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.

The acquisition of dative alternation by German-English bilingual and English monolingual children

“…In the elicitation task, they show underdetermination of the semantic NRRs in German because 28% of the ditransitive sentences they produced contained ungrammatical or contextually inappropriate alternations. The result that syntactic and semantic knowledge are affected differently supports similar findings by Stöhr, Akpınar, Bianchi, and Kupisch (2012) and Kupisch, Akpınar, and Stöhr (2013).…”

“…This provides not only a greater quantity of input for these children than for most 'heritage' speakers, but also a greater quality of input in the sense of Paradis (2011) because there is a variety of different native German speakers in the children's environment. See Kupisch et al (2013) for similar arguments that 'heritage' speakers' languages are not always as starkly unbalanced as is sometimes assumed.…”

Grammatical Gender in Norwegian: Language Acquisition and Language Change

“…Related to the transparency of the nominal system is the question of gender assignment vs. gender agreement, as discussed in several recent studies, e.g., Bianchi (2013) and Kupisch, Akpinar & Stöhr (2013), where non-target-consistent correspondence between different gender forms is considered to be the result of problems with gender assignment and a mismatch between forms to be due to a problemwith gender agreement. As mentioned above (section 4.3), we do not think that this distinction can be made for the Norwegian data: Given the nature of the Norwegian gender system as well as previous findings (e.g., Rodina & Westergaard 2013a, b), we assume that it is gender assignment that is difficult for Norwegian children, given the lack of transparency in the system, not the actual agreement forms, which are relatively uncomplicated.…”

“…Note that the experiment tests three gender forms for each item, the indefinite article, the adjective, and the prenominal determiner in the double definite DPs. This means that our study could in principle also address the question of gender assignment vs. gender agreement, as defined in many recent acquisition studies on languages such as Italian and German, e.g., Bianchi (2013) and Kupisch, Akpinar & Stöhr (2013): In cases where there is non-target-consistent agreement between the noun and the other target forms, correspondence between the different forms (concord) has been used to argue that the problem is in gender assignment, while non-correspondence (discord) indicates that the problem is with agreement. However, this issue is not part of our main research focus, as the nature of the Norwegian gender system (see section 2.1) gives us reason to expect children to have problems with assignment rather than agreement.…”

Differences in use without deficiencies in competence: passives in the Turkish and German of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany

“…If, however, HSs only show differences in the production of gender agreement, and especially do so with particular empirical measures (offline, but less so online), then concluding that a representation is incomplete or attrited is premature. HSs might simply have a problem with gender assignment at the lexical level, for example, potentially due to reduced input, but not a problem with the syntactic operation of agreement per se (see Hopp 2013 for adult L2 acquisition; Kupisch, Akpınar andStöhr 2013, Irrizari van Suchtelen, 2016 for HSs). The divergence from monolinguals would still qualify as a HS difference; it is simply not clear that such a difference would relate to an incomplete representation in the mental grammar of HSs via arrested development or attrition.…”