The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch

Abstract

The acquisition of grammatical gender has long been known to cause problems for non-native (L2) adult acquirers (Harley, 1979; Rogers, 1987; Carroll, 1989; Zekhnini and Hulstijn, 1995; Bartning, 2000; Bruhn de Garavito and White, 2000; Dewaele and Veronique, 2001; Franceschina, 2005;). Bilingual children, on the other hand, seem to acquire grammatical gender at the same rate as monolingual children (Carroll, 1989; Mills, 1986; Muller, 1994). Furthermore, although most studies demonstrate that grammatical gender remains non-targetlike for most adult L2 learners, there is some evidence that this target language property is acquirable at later ages, especially when grammatical gender is instantiated in the first language (L1) (Bruhn de Garavito and White, 2000; Hawkins and Franceschina, 2004; Franceschina, 2005). Having said that, recent studies measuring on-line processing show that adult L2 learners with seemingly nativelike knowledge process grammatical gender in a non-native fashion (Sabourin and Haverkort, 2003). Thus, although the L2 acquisition of grammatical gender has been studied extensively, the findings are far from clear-cut. The contributions in this volume build upon this previous research by expanding the locus of investigation to different learner populations: in addition to L2 adults, acquisition of gender by impaired and unimpaired L2 children and by bilingual (2L1) and monolingual children will be discussed. All of the articles in this volume deal with the same L2, namely Dutch.