L’influence de la langue maternelle dans la maîtrise de l’assignation et de l’accord du genre grammatical en français langue seconde.

First language influence on the acquisition of grammatical gender assignment and agreement in French as a second language. The first language (L1) can facilitate the process of learning grammatical gender (GG) in the second language (L2), especially when, the two gender systems show similarities. However, relatively few studies compare the L2 acquisition of gender in different L1 learner groups, they often group different morphosyntactic phenomena under the same term “grammatical gender agreement” and they dwell little on the criteria used to determine the degree of similarity between L1 and L2. Our research attempts to remedy this by dissociating the mastery of gender assignment as opposed to gender agreement in French as a second language (FL2), and it examines gender mastery in French L2 by several L1 learner groups (English, German, and Spanish). It also discusses more precisely the degree of proximity between these languages and French. The overall results indicate that the degree of mastery achieved for these gender subsystems is highest in subjects in whom the parametric differences.