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, semantic, and syntactic cues. Results showed that the students were sensitive to cues in the word-final phonemes that reliably indicate gender and implicational scaling demonstrated a clear order of difficulty among these endings. These 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 to nouns with complementary cues, 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. Clear scales of difficulty among the various combinations of cue types emerged.

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