The Acquisition of Bilingual Gender in German-french Bilinguals
Open Access
- Author:
- Pappas, Leah Joann
- Area of Honors:
- Linguistics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Carrie Neal Jackson, Thesis Supervisor
Lisa A Reed, Thesis Honors Advisor
Adriana Van Hell, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- grammatical gender
German
French
linguistics
behavioral - Abstract:
- It is commonly known that learning grammatical gender in a second language (L2) is incredibly difficult. Although many studies have investigated L2 gender processing, there is still gray area as to whether or not these difficulties are due to difficulty learning the L2 gender system or first language (L1) influence on L2 gender production. Most studies that have examined how L1 gender influences the learning and production of L2 gender have focused on languages with the same number of gender categories – Czech-German (Bordag & Pechman, 2007), Greek-German (Salamoura & Williams, 2007) – and/or languages that are closely related to one another and, thus, have a large degree of overlap in regards to gender assignment (German-Dutch, Sabourin, Stowe, & de Haan, 2006). Studying German-French learners provides an opportunity to examine L1 gender influence between two different languages with incongruent gender systems. While German has a three-gender system –masculine, feminine, and neuter– French has a two-gender system – masculine and feminine. This study will compare the reaction times in an L2 production task between L1 German - L2 French learners in order to examine how the L1 gender system influences L2 gender learning, especially among nouns with no gender equivalent in the L2.