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For native speakers of French the acquisition of gender seems to vary across children, however most (typically developing) children have mastered gender by the age of 3 or 4. Studies have shown that L1 French children initially tend to over- generalise masculine forms of determiners, however some children use the feminine as the default form (Prévost 2009). For L1 French children, gender agreement between the definite article and the noun is acquired before agreement between the indefinite article and the noun. Moreover, article noun agreement is mastered before adjective noun agreement (Dewaele & Véronique 2001; Prévost 2009).

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In contrast to L1 learners of French, the acquisition of French gender has been shown to be a particularly slow and difficult process, even for L2 learners within naturalistic settings. For example, Ayoun (2007:147) posits that English-speaking learners are faced with five key tasks in the learning of French gender and these are made more difficult due to complex and ambiguous input. English speakers have to learn that:

a. French has inherent as well as grammatical gender b. The proper gender assignment of each lexical item c. The proper Det+Noun agreement

d. The proper Adj+Noun agreement e. The proper word place of Noun+Adj

So once learners have fulfilled the first task of learning that French has grammatical as well as inherent gender, how do L2 learners then learn the gender assignment of nouns in French? As previously discussed the gender feature must be stored as an inherent property of each noun in French. But how is this established in the L2 lexicon from the L2 input?

Studies suggest that L1 French children tend to use morpho-phonological cues (word endings) to assign gender before around age 6 and that, as they grow older, L1 learners tend to rely more heavily on syntactic cues (Prévost 2009). Karmiloff-Smith (1979) also found that the young L2 French learners in her study relied more heavily on phonological cues (i.e. word endings) for learning gender assignment. As the learners became older there was increased attention to syntactic information which eventually won over the phonological cues. Overall, she concludes that the findings correspond with data from L1 acquisition studies which indicate that children focus on formal rather than semantic cues for gender classification. However, from studies of older L2 learners, it is not obvious that adults pay attention to phonological cues for gender assignment. According to Carroll (1999), older learners do not rely on endings since they are more sensitive to semantic and morphological cues.

There have been few studies of child L2 French, however Grondin & White (1996) and Paradis & Crago (2000) found that determiners are produced at early stages and accuracy in gender appears to be lower than for number and also lower than for L1 learners. It is posited that the major difference is the clitic status of L2 French which is not the same as for L1 French. Carroll (1989) reported that child English-speaking

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learners of French produced stressed articles and did not repeat the article after a pause, unlike L1 learners. She asserts that determiners are learnt as independent phonological units in contrast to child L1 French where they are initially learnt as part of the noun. She also claims that it is the reliance on determiner cues that leads to the differences in perception of gender assignment seen in L1 and L2 learners of French. Carroll asserts that for L2 learners, the determiner and noun are already segmented and therefore since there is no need to work out determiner-noun segmentation, L2 learners are not sensitive to the gender information contained in the determiner and this assertion is echoed by Granfeldt (2005).

More recent cognitive-based research into the L2 acquisition of grammatical gender suggests that the phonological and semantic clues alone are not enough for learner to correctly assign gender to nouns. Grüter et al. (2012) argue that learners must rely on co-occurrence relations between nouns and gender-marked modifiers with determiners considered as most important. Sourdot (1977); Carroll (1989) and Saffran et al. (1996) all contend that children’s failure to segment determiner+noun combinations, which are first considered as unanalysed chunks, are a key

mechanism in early L1 language learning. Grüter et al. (2012) posit that the close associations between co-occurring elements such as determiners and nouns are at first likely to be lexically specific and then as vocabulary size increases these will lead to more rule-based associations. They state that ‘lexical representation of grammatical gender in native lexicon is crucially shaped by early distributional learning’ (p.209). As a result the strong associations between nouns and their gender-marked modifiers will be much stronger in the L1 lexicon compared to the L2 lexicon due to distributional learning and will therefore be more readily accessed and retrieved in on-line language production. Evidence from Tucker et al. (1977) may also lend support to this claim since they report that some native speakers of French have occasional difficulty with vowel-initial words, which have a non-gender-marked determiner for example; l’arbre (the tree).

Grüter et al. (2012) also state that a fundamental difference in L2 learning is that learners beyond childhood approach the task of language learning with existing knowledge of their own L1 which in turn permits them to exploit a number of cues that would not be available to young infants, such as the parallels between the L1/L2, metalinguistic information and, very importantly, information specific to written

language such as gaps between words. As a result, it is claimed that they are unlikely to place the same emphasis on co-occurring elements as L1 learners. In

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their 2012 study Grüter et al. observed that L2 learners performed very well on novel nouns preceded by a gender-marked determiner only. They claim that the task imitated L1word learning more closely and therefore enhanced the salience of the co- occurrence relations. These findings support those of Arnon & Ramscar (2009; 2012) who taught an artificial language to adults. It is reported that the learners that were exposed to determiner+noun sequences first learnt better, which they claim is as a result of them being forced to use distributional information. Learners who were exposed to the noun only first paid less attention to determiners in the second round of learning and therefore failed to learn the gender-class information encoded in them.

In contrast, Ayoun (2007) argues that the determiner on its own is not enough to provide the necessary input to learn the gender assignment of nouns since this is based upon learners having accurate phonetic representations of the determiners. For lower proficiency L1-speaking learners of French, the indefinite determiners un and une constitute a phonetic contrast that is problematic since the sounds are not part of the phonemic system of English. Ayoun claims that 21% of nouns begin with a vowel and therefore lack gender marking on the articles (only 3 out of 11 singular determiners are gender-marked for vowel initial words and 51% of these are feminine nouns). Moreover, Hawkins & Franceschina (2004) posit that it is syntactic cues (determiner and adjectives) that are critical to the acquisition of gender assignment and state that English learners of French ‘will not proceed beyond the stage of probabilistic selection of the determiner forms on the basis of noun phonology’ (p.187).

The results of the various studies noted above indicate that there are a variety of cues involved in the acquisition of French gender assignment; phonological, morphological, semantic and collocational and the availability and use of the cues depends upon the age of the learner, the learning situation and the nature of the input. Whilst providing useful information in terms of how gender assignment is learnt these studies are limited in their scope as they are frequently based upon an experimental approach in which variables are highly controlled and evidence of long- term learning is minimal. These studies fail to reflect the complexity of the input faced in a real-life language classroom and, furthermore, are mainly cross-sectional and therefore do not provide evidence of how individual learners’ knowledge

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5.2.2.1 How do learners acquire L2 gender agreement?

There is general consensus in syntactic literature that the concept of gender agreement is best captured by the notion of checking relations between the gender feature on the head noun and the functional features on the determiners and

adjectives (Bernstein 1993; Carstens 2000; Chomsky 1995; Ritter 1993). However, there are differing explanations of the exact function and mechanisms for this feature checking3. The learning of L2 grammatical gender has often been studied from a UG or Minimalist perspective (Chomsky 2000) although there is disagreement amongst different researchers. Some researchers working within this theoretical paradigm argue that gender agreement is an ‘uninterpretable’ feature that cannot be learnt after a ‘critical period’ of language acquisition since UG is no longer available. Hawkins & Franceschina (2004) named this concept the ‘Failed Functional Feature Hypothesis’ for which it is claimed that L2 learners may well be able to learn the gender assignment of a lexical item, but not the agreement.

At the other end of the spectrum is the ‘Full Access Hypothesis’ (e.g. Schwartz & Sprouse 1994; 1996) which argues that that all L2 features are acquirable, although there is some disagreement as to whether the features are available from the outset of L2 learning or whether they become available over time (Grondin & White 1993; Haznedar 2003). Other researchers have argued that functional categories are at first absent in early interlanguage grammars and gradually develop in stages on the basis of input (‘Minimal Trees Hypothesis’, also called ‘Organic Grammar’ Vainikka & Young Scholten 1998). An alternative idea is termed the ‘Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Haznedar & Schwartz 1997; Lardière 2000; Prévost and White 2000) which posits that functional categories are available in early L2 grammars but that the difficulty lies in mapping grammatical features to their surface morphological forms. White et al. (2004) and Ayoun (2007b) all challenge the impairment hypotheses arguing that empirical evidence has shown that L1 English-speaking learners of French can acquire French features that are not present in the L1 (studies of learners of L2 French will be discussed in detail in section 5.23). Nevertheless, Ayoun

(2007b) states that, even though functional categories may, in principle, be

acquirable the acquisition of L2 gender will be a difficult task that requires extensive input.

3

There is not space in this thesis to provide a full discussion on this subject; however see Franceschina (2005) for an overview of the syntax of gender agreement.

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Several researchers have offered cognitivist explanations for the results seen in the studies of L2 learners. It is argued that the focus should remain on individual cognitive factors such as attention, memory and motivation (Ayoun 2007b; Dewaele & Véronique 2001; Prodeau 2005). From a psycholinguistic perspective, acquisition of a feature such as gender agreement is not simply considered as the instantiation of a grammatical feature but rather as the transfer of processing routines from L1 to L2. For example, Sabourin and Stowe (2008) studied 45 high proficiency learners of Dutch using neuro-imaging to track processing patterns. The results showed that some degree of native-like processing is possible for late L2 learning but that L2 processing is slower. Also they argue that native-like processing is limited to processing aspects of syntax that are quite similar between L2 and L1. They conclude by saying that for rule-governed constructions similar in the L1 and L2, such as verb placement, the processing routines for native and non-native speakers are similar. On the other hand, constructions that are not grammatically similar, or are dependent on lexically specific features that are rarely the same in L1 and L2 (such as grammatical gender), are unlikely to result in similar processing routines. Foucart & Frenck-Mestre (2011) assert that learners proceed through different levels of syntactic processing and maintain for example that post-posed adjectives are easier to learn due to their more frequent occurrence in the input and the fact that they are unique in the L2 which in turn makes them more salient to the L2 learner. As a result the learner is more inclined to process post-posed adjectives. They also claim that pre-posed adjectives are initially not processed for gender and observed that accuracy with pre-posed adjectives increases with proficiency.

5.2.3 Results of previous studies of the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2