An Experimental Study on the Learning of Arbitrary and Non-Arbitrary Gender of Pseudo Dutch Nouns by Nonnative and Native Speakers of Dutch

Abstract

An experimental study on the learning of arbitrary and non-arbitrary gender of pseudo Dutch nouns by nonnative and native speakers of Dutch Zekhnini, A.; Hulstijn, J.H.

Second Language Acquisition Research in The Laboratory

“…The 20 studies included in this review are, in alphabetical order, Alanen (1995), Carroll and Swain (1993), Carroll, Swain, and Roberge (1992), Cook (1988), de Graaff (this issue), DeKeyser (1995, this issue), Doughty (1991), N. Ellis (1993), N. C. Ellis and Schmidt (this issue), Hulstijn (1989c), Issidorides (1988), Leow (1993), Robinson (1996, this issue), Robinson and Ha (1993), Shook (1994), VanPatten (1990), Yang and Givón (this issue), and Zekhnini and Hulstijn (1995). There are probably more studies that meet the preceding criteria, but these could not be traced before the completion of this text (summer 1996).…”

“…2. Some studies address the issue of rule versus item learning (de Graaff, this issue;DeKeyser, 1995;Ellis & Schmidt, this issue;Robinson, 1996, this issue;Zekhnini & Hulstijn, 1995). To what extent should language acquisition be seen as the learning of abstract rules and principles (Chomsky, 1986;Pinker, 1989) or rather as the acquisition of specific exemplars, the acquisition of similarities between exemplars (cues), and the generalization of cues (the associationist, connectionist perspective, represented by MacWhinney [1989])?…”

“…Hulstijn (1989c) confronted Dutch subjects with sentences made up of Dutch content words (so that the meaning of the sentences could be easily understood) but containing some artificial morphemes and an artificial word order (the learning targets). Zekhnini and Hulstijn (1995) investigated how native and nonnative speakers of Dutch learned article-noun pairs, consisting of either one of the two Dutch definite articles (de and het) followed by a pseudo-Dutch noun. The aim of the study was to falsify the claim that learners obligatorily encode noun gender as an inherent noun feature.…”

Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Italian as a Foreign Language

“…Also like L1 speakers, L2 students stated that at times they chose the article that sounded the best. Zekhnini & Hulstijn (1995) investigated the claim made by Carroll (1989) that the differences between L1 and L2 speakers' ability to assign gender lies in the encoding process. While native speakers encode gender as an intrinsic feature of the noun, non-native speakers of languages without gender "transfer their noun category -crucially without an inherent gender feature to the tasks of acquiring new words" (Carroll, 1989, p. 581).…”

“…A number of studies have been undertaken to examine this issue. The research that has been carried out in this area has tended to concentrate on comparing the type of cue sensitivity exhibited by L2 learners (in metalinguistic judgments or in elicited speech) to that of native speakers or other L2 learners with different language backgrounds (Cain, et al, 1987;Delisle, 1985;Hardison, 1992;Marinova-Todd, 1994, as cited in Bialystok, 1997;Stevens, 1984;Surridge & Lessard, 1984;Zekhnini & Hulstijn, 1995) or to analyzing L2 learners' speech or written production errors of gender agreement (Andersen, 1984;Finneman, 1992;Harley, 1979;Rogers, 1987). A few studies have also investigated teaching practices directed at improving L2 learners' performance with grammatical gender (Desrochers, Gélinas, & Wieland, 1989: Harley, in press;Luce, 1979;Tucker, et al, 1969).…”