Assignment of grammatical gender by native speakers and foreign learners of French

Abstract

Abstract This study compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production. Both groups performed on-line gender assignment to real nouns whose gender was regular or exceptional, given their ending, and to invented nouns with nonword stems and real-word endings. The pattern of results indicated that the native speakers' gender attributions were primarily based on rapidly evoked lexical associations, with gender-ending correspondences playing a significant but subsidiary role. The foreign learners were less able to summon lexical associations, relying heavily on ending-based rules. Overall, none of the foreign learners attained the same level of performance as any of the native speakers. We conclude that instruction in which students learn nouns in the context of distinctive lexical associates could profitably be supplemented by explicit instruction in gender-ending regularities.

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