Learners Difficulties with Grammatical Gender in German as a Foreign Language

Rogers, Margaret

doi:10.1093/applin/8.1.48

Cited by 49 publications

(40 citation statements)

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“…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 (Berman, 1986;Cain, Weber-Olsen, & Smith, 1987;Clark, 1986;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979;Levy, 1983;Mills, 1986;Pérez-Pereira, 1991;Surridge, 1993).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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).…”

Section: L2 Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The masculine singular form functioned as the default category for all three students. Rogers (1987) looked at how English university students use grammatical gender in their writing of essays in German and found that considerable difficulty with gender agreement exists even for advanced learners. The number of errors they produced was influenced by the grammatical case in which the noun occurred, e.g., feminine dative was the most problematic.…”

Section: L2 Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Italian as a Foreign Language

Oliphant¹

1998

The Canadian Modern Language Review

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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 (

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: L2 Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: L2 Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Italian as a Foreign Language

Oliphant¹

1998

The Canadian Modern Language Review

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“…This said, it might also be the case that the presence of a gendermarking effect in bilinguals may depend on how old they were when they started acquiring and using the language(s). Second-language acquisition research seems to show that early bilinguals (i.e., those who acquired and used their gender-marking language regularly before adolescence) make no, or very few, gender-production errors, whereas late bilinguals (i.e., those who acquired their other language during adolescence or as adults) make a substantial number of gender errors (see, e.g., Carroll, 1989;Rogers, 1987). This is reflected anecdotally in an interview given by Sir Winston Churchill on French radio in 1946.…”

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confidence: 99%

The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals

2001

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There is increasing evidence that in languages that have gender agreement, a congruent gender marking usually speeds up the processing of the following noun relative to an incongruent marking (or no marking). This effect is now well established in monolinguals, but little is known about how bilinguals react to gender agreement. In this paper, we ask whether bilinguals show the same effect and whether it depends on when they acquired and started using the gender-marking language on a regular basis.In what is fast becoming a classic, Corbett (1991) stated that gender is the most puzzling of the grammatical categories that interests nonlinguists as well as linguists, and that it becomes more fascinating the more it is investigated. Gender can be defined as follows: "A subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms" (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1991). Depending on the language, words (nouns usually) carry any number of genders; from two in such languages as Italian, Spanish, and French, all the way to six for Swahili. Of particular interest here is that other word classes in a language that has gender, such as adjectives, verbs, articles, pronouns, and so on, do not have a gender per se but can reflect, in their inflectional morphology, the gender of the words that do. Thus, depending on the language, a gender agreement marking can appear before or after a noun on a determiner, adjective, pronoun, and so on. In the case of French, for example, voiture is feminine, and in the phrase leur petite voiture (their small car), the adjective (petite) agrees with the noun and carries a feminine ending. In the phrase le garçon, the definite article is masculine since the noun is of that gender.It is now well established that a congruent gender marking will speed up the processing of the following noun. This has been shown in reading, for example, by Gurjanov, Lukatela, Lukatela, Savic, and Turvey (1985) in SerboCroatian and by Colé and Segui (1994) in French. In speech, Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillelmon, and Besson (1994), working with French, showed with a gating task that participants needed less of a noun to identify it when it was preceded by a gender-congruent article (they were also more confident about the word they proposed), and with a lexical decision task, they showed that the participants were faster at deciding that the noun was a word. Recently, Jakubowicz and Faussart (1998), also working on spoken French and using a lexical decision task, replicated a strong gender effect.Researchers have also used a neutral or baseline condition in order to determine whether the effect is due to congruency (facilitation), incongruency (inhibition), or both. Schmidt (1986), for example, found a significant incongruency effect in German, but not a co...

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“…hardly makin g productio n error s wit h article s an d demonstratives), how woul d w e explai n th e differenc e betwee n thei r eas e o f learning arbitrary , non-semantic , forma l feature s an d th e difficult y wit h which adult s (native s an d nonnatives alike) appea r t o lear n suc h feature s (cf. Andersson, 1992;MacWhinney, 1989 ;Magnan, 1983 ;Rogers, 1987 ;Sokolik & Smith, 1992 ;Taraban, McDonald & MacWhinney, 1989) ? What w e ha d t o explain the n i s a differenc e no t between firs t an d secon d languag e learnin g but a differenc e betwee n younge r an d olde r learner s (a s fa r a s arbitrary , nonsemantic, forma l feature s ar e concerned).…”

Section: Speculations and Questions For Further Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%