Gender agreement in L2 French: Pre‐advanced vs advanced learners

Abstract

In the analysis of 1352 forms of gender agreement on determiners and adjectives in L2 learners of French, it was found that gender on the definite determiner is acquired before the indefinite determiner, and the masculine before the feminine. This study focuses on two levels of learners, advanced and preadvanced. For the advanced learners the difference in gender acquisition for definite and indefinite determiners is significant, but for the preadvanced learners gender agreement appears randomly, particularly with the indefinite determiner un/une. The advanced learners' accuracy rate for agreement adjectives was not found to be higher for attributive than for predicative adjectives. On the contrary, agreement in anteposition is the most difficult at this level. When Pienemann's processability hierarchy is extended to the mastery and automatization of adjectival agreement, the results clearly indicate that it is the inflection of feminine forms that causes more problems for learners than the exchange of grammatical information across clause boundaries. The difficulties learners have with the morphological form seem to be more predictable and systematic than the difficulties caused by syntactic complexity.