Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T22:48:03.310Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The development of gender in simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition of French – Evidence for AOA and input effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2016

JONAS GRANFELDT
JONAS GRANFELDT*
Affiliation:
Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
*
Address for correspondence: Prof. Jonas Granfeldt, Lund University, Centre for Languages and Literature, Box 201, 221 00 Lund, Sweden, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of Age of Onset of Acquisition (AOA) and the quality and quantity of input on the longitudinal development of gender in the acquisition of French by simultaneous (2L1) and successive bilinguals (cL2). Three aspects of French gender are studied: the abstract GENDER feature, gender assignment and gender concord. The findings show that amount and quality of input correlate significantly with the rate of development of gender assignment. Group-level analyses on gender concord show that there is no significant difference between the L1 and the 2L1 groups and that error patterns are different in the 2L1 and cL2 groups. We conclude that while it is clear from the data that the development of gender assignment is primarily dependent on input conditions the question is more open with respect to gender concord. For concord a combination of AOA, the L1 acquisitional timetable, and input are important factors.

Keywords

Frenchgenderage of onset of acquisitioninputsimultaneous bilingualssuccessive bilinguals
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Special Issue 4: Recent developments in child bilingualism: Cross-linguistic influence, incomplete acquisition, critical periods and the advantages of bilingualism , August 2018 , pp. 674 - 693
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*I owe a lot to my colleagues Anita Thomas and Malin Ågren at the Centre for Languages and Literature in Lund. The input profile score that I am using in this paper was really their idea to begin with, while I am solely responsible for the empirical analysis in this work. Some of the results on gender assignment are based on student work by Azize Günes who is hereby acknowledged. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Language Learning Seminar at Lund University and at EuroSLA 25 in Aix-en-Provence. I thank the audiences present. I also acknowledge the comments from three BLC reviewers and from Tanja Kupisch who helped to considerably improve the manuscript. All remaining errors are mine. The study was funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council, grant number 2008–2086, to the project Age of Onset of Acquisition and Linguistic Development in French.

References

Ågren, M., Granfeldt, J., & Thomas, A. (2014). Combined effects of age of onset and input on the development of different grammatical structures: A study of simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition of French. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4, 461–492.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andersson, A-B. (1992). Second language learners’ acquisition of grammatical gender in Swedish. PhD dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Göteborg.Google Scholar
Bartning, I. (2000). Gender agreement in L2 French: Pre-advanced vs. advanced learners. Studia Linguistica, 54, 224–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartning, I., & Schlyter, S. (2004). Itinéraires acquisitionnels et stades de développement en français L2. Journal of French Language Studies, 14, 281–299.Google Scholar
Bianchi, G. (2013). Gender in Italian–German bilinguals: A comparison with German L2 learners of Italian. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 538–557.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, S. (1989). Second language acquisition and the computational paradigm. Language Learning, 39, 535–594.Google Scholar
Carroll, S. (1999). Input and SLA: Adults’ sensitivity to different sorts of cues to French gender. Language Learning, 49, 37–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carstens, V. (2000). Concord in minimalist theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 31, 319–55.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chondrogianni, V., & Marinis, T. (2011). Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 318–345.Google Scholar
Clark, E. (1985). The acquisition of Romance with special reference to French. In Slobin, D. (ed.), The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 1, pp. 687–782. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (2009). Bilingual first language acquisition. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Dewaele, J-M., & Véronique, D. (2001). Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage: A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4, 275–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2007). Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: A constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10, 224–247.Google Scholar
Gilpin, A. R. (1993). Table for conversion of Kendall's Tau to Spearman's Rho within the context of measures of magnitude of effect for meta-analysis. Educational and psychological measurement, 53, 87–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glahn, E., Håkansson, G., Hammarberg, B., & Holmen, A. (2001). Processability in Scandinavian second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,23, 389–416.Google Scholar
Granfeldt, J. (2003). L'acquisition des Catégories Fonctionnelles: Étude comparative du développement du DP français chez des enfants et des apprenants adultes. Thèse pour le doctorat. Études romanes de Lund 67. Institut d’Études Romanes de Lund: Université de Lund.Google Scholar
Granfeldt, J. (2005). The development of gender assignment in bilingual first and second language French. In Dewaele, J.M. (ed.), Focus on French a Foreign Language: multidisciplinary approaches, pp. 164–190. Clevdon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Granfeldt, J. (2012). Development of object clitics in child L2 French: A comparison of developmental sequences in different modes of acquisition. Languages, Interaction and Acquisition, 3, 140–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granfeldt, J., Schlyter, S., & Kilhstedt, M. (2007). French as cL2, 2L1 and L2 in pre-school children. In Granfeldt, J. (ed.), Studies in Romance Bilingual Acquisition – Age of Onset and Development of French and Spanish, pp. 6–41. PERLES No. 24. Centre for Languages and Literature: University of Lund.Google Scholar
Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28, 191–215.Google Scholar
Günes, A. (2014). Le développement du genre grammatical en français. Étude longitudinale et comparative sur l'attribution du genre chez deux enfants bilingues successifs et un enfant bilingue simultané âgés de 4 à 6 ans. Mémoire de maîtrise, Centre des langues et de littérature: Université de Lund.Google Scholar
Harley, B. (1979). French gender rules in the speech of English-dominant French-dominant and monolingual French-speaking children. Working Papers in Bilingualism 19, 129–156.Google Scholar
Hawkins, R., & Franceschina, F. (2004). Explaining the acquisition of and non-acquisition of determiner-noun gender concord in French and Spanish. In Prévost, P. & Paradis, J. (eds.), The acquisition of French in different contexts: Focus on functional categories, pp. 175–205. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hulk, A. (2004). The acquisition of the French DP in a bilingual context. In Prévost, P. & Paradis, J. (eds.), The acquisition of French in different contexts: Focus on functional categories, pp 243–275. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A Functional Approach to Child Language: A Study of Determiners and Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T., Müller, N., & Cantone, K. (2002). Gender in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition: Comparing Italian and French. Lingue e Linguaggio, 1, 107–149.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T., Akpinar, D., & Stöhr, A. (2013). Gender assignment and gender agreement in adult bilingual and second language speakers of French. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3, 150–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindström, E. (2013) L'acquisition du genre en français L2 – développement et variation. PhD dissertation, Stockholm University.Google Scholar
Lyster, R. (2006). Predictability in French gender attribution: A corpus analysis. Journal of French Language Studies, 16, 69–92.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Marty, F. (2001). Les signaux morphologiques du français parlé. Le français moderne, LXIX, 211–240.Google Scholar
Meisel, J.M. (1994). Getting FAT: Finiteness, agreement and tense in early grammars. In Meisel, J. M. (ed.), Bilingual First Language Acquisition, pp. 89–129. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2008). Child second language acquisition or successive first language acquisition? In Haznedar, B. & Gavruseva, E. (eds.), Current trends in child second language acquisition: A generative perspective, pp. 55–80. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Möhring, A. (2001). The acquisition of French by German pre-school children: An empirical investigation of gender assignment and gender agreement. In Foster-Cohen, S. & Nizegorodcew, A. (eds.), EUROSLA Yearbook, pp. 171–194. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Müller, N. (1994). Gender and number agreement within DP. In Meisel, J. M. (ed.), Bilingual first language acquisition: French and German grammatical development, pp. 53–89. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E., & Marchak, K. (2011). Le carte blanc or la carte blanche? Bilingual children's acquisition of French adjective agreement. Language Learning, 61, 734–758.Google Scholar
Muñoz, C. (2014). Contrasting Effects of Starting Age and Input on the Oral Performance of Foreign Language Learners. Applied Linguistics, 35, 463–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second language acquisition: Comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 213–237.Google Scholar
Platzack, C. (1992). Functional categories and early Swedish. In Meisel, J. M. (ed.), The acquisition of verb placement: Functional categories and V2 phenomena in language acquisition, pp. 63–82. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prévost, P. (2009). The acquisition of French: The development of inflectional morphology and syntax in L1 acquisition, bilingualism, and L2 acquisition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Riegel, M., Pellat, J-C., & Rioul, R. (1994). Grammaire Méthodique du Français. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Rodina, Y., & Westergaard, M. (2013). The acquisition of gender and declension class in a non-transparent system: monolinguals and bilinguals. Studia Linguistica, 67, 47–67.Google Scholar
Schlyter, S. (2003). Development of verb morphology and finiteness in children and adults. In Dimroth, C. & Starren, M. (eds.), Information structure and the dynamics of language acquisition, pp. 15–44. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlyter, S., & Thomas, A. (2012). L1 or L2 acquisition? Finiteness in child second language learners (cL2), compared to adult L2 learners (aL2) and young bilingual children (2L1). In Watorek, M., Benazzo, S. & Hickmann, M. (eds.), Comparative Perspectives to Language Acquisition: A tribute to Clive Perdue, pp. 282–302. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Sorace, A. (2005). Syntactic optionality at interfaces. In Cornips, L., & Corrigan, K. (eds.), Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the biological and the social, pp. 46–111. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Surridge, M. E. (1993). Gender assignment in French: The hierarchy of rules and the chronology of acquisition. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 77–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, I. M. (2014). Early, late or very late? Timing acquisition and bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4, 283–313.Google Scholar
Tucker, G. A., Lambert, W.E., & Rigault, A. (1977). The French Speaker's Skill with Grammatical Gender: An example of rule-governed behavior. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2013). Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 86–110.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S., Argyri, F., Cornips, L., Hulk, A., Sorace, A., & Tsimpli, I. (2011). Bilingual acquisition of Greek voice morphology and Dutch gender: What do they have in common? In Danis, N., Mesh, K., & Sung, H. (eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 590–602. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S., Argyri, F., Cornips, L., Hulk, A., Sorace, A., & Tsimpli, I.M. (2014). On the role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 765–805.Google Scholar