2023 Ongoing

Assignment of grammatical gender

Assignment of grammatical gender by second language learners.

The objective of the project is to examine the factors that guide second-language learners in the assignment of grammatical gender to words that they do not know.

In this project, we evaluated the relative impact of three factors on the gender assignment of nouns in French as a second language: 1) the French word ending, 2) the gender of the equivalent word in the learners’ native language, and 3) the universal and widely recognized phenomenon of assigning the masculine gender by default.

Our participants are more than 2,400 adults whose native language, either German or Polish, has masculine, feminine and neuter gender. Participants were from all levels of proficiency in French. We had selected 24 words in which the correct and incorrect gender assignment can be explained by only one of the three mentioned factors.

Our aim is to extend the study to other second languages with a less transparent grammatical gender than French.