Native language influence in the second language acquisition of French grammatical features: the case of gender assignment.

Grammatical gender presents a challenge for any second language learner of French. Many studies have investigated this phenomenon since Surridge’s pioneering work (1993), but they were often concerned with the internal difficulties of the target language, such as the unreliability of noun ending cues (Desrochers et al. 1989, Carroll 1989). The present paper discusses cross-linguistic influences in a second language learning context. It aims to investigate how the gender assignment system (AS) of the native language influences the mastery of gender assignment in French, by comparing oral production data in three learner groups of French L2 and a French control group. The position of the AS of the three selected L1’s (English, German and Spanish) differs from the French AS with regard to the number of distinguished gender values and the nature of the assignment criteria at hand (Corbett 1991). The purpose of this study is to examine whether a possible correlation exists between the position of these different gender AS and the French AS, on the one hand, and L2 learners’ performances, on the other hand.