THE ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER BY FRENCH AS A SECOND

LANGUAGE LEARNERS ENROLLED IN FRENCH IMMERSION

by

Klaudia Krenca

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts

Graduate Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Klaudia Krenca 2015

ii

THE ACQUISITION OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER BY FRENCH AS A SECOND

LANGUAGE LEARNERS ENROLLED IN FRENCH IMMERSION

Master of Arts 2015

Klaudia Krenca

Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development

University of Toronto

Abstract

In Study 1, the relationship between morphophonological cues and gender assignment in

French was examined among a group of 148 French L2 children (M = 114.66 months, SD =

19.69). Study 2 investigated gender-marking ability in French among a subset of 27 children

from the first study (M = 120.74 months, SD = 16.14). In the determiner task, participants

assigned the indefinite article unMASC or uneFEM to pseudowords whose endings were typically

masculine, feminine or neutral. In the picture task, children pointed to the picture of a female or

male Martian that best personified each spoken pseudoword. The results provided evidence that

correct gender assignment improved across grade. More ending-consistent responses were given

to feminine endings than to masculine endings. Children whose L1 marked gender were better at

gender-marking in French than children whose L1 did not mark gender. Finally, there was

evidence of a default subclass for gender-neutral nouns.

iii

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful for the hard work and dedication of several people involved in

this journey. First of all, I would like to thank my wonderful supervisor, Dr. Xi Chen, for her

copious feedback while designing the measures and in writing this thesis. Thank you for

providing me with ample opportunities to expand my knowledge and for believing in me along

the way. Second, I am indebted to Dr. Kathleen Hipfner-Boucher for her invaluable insights. I

am incredibly inspired by your passion for research, your witty sense of humour, and the selfless

amount of time that you spend caring for yourself, your family and your students, all while

fighting a perilous battle with your illness. Your strength and courage during this difficult time

are incredible.

I would like to thank the parents, teachers and children for their participation in the

study. Moreover, this study would not have been possible without all of the research assistants,

volunteers, and Research Opportunity Program students who had been involved in some aspect

of the project. Your time, dedication, insights and enthusiasm will not be forgotten.

I am thankful for my faith, which gave me strength throughout this entire journey,

especially during unforeseen circumstances. Finally, I am immensely grateful for the unwavering

support that I received from my family, friends, co-workers and lab mates. Each of them guided,

nourished, laughed and believed in me throughout this one-year master’s program. Thank you!

iv

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv

List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. vi

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vii

List of Appendices ....................................................................................................................... viii

Chapter 1 : Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1

Chapter 2: The Grammatical Gender System ................................................................................. 5

Grammatical Gender ....................................................................................................................... 5

Gender Agreement .......................................................................................................................... 6

Gender Assignment Principles ........................................................................................................ 7

The Gender System in French ......................................................................................................... 8

Processing in Gender Assignment .................................................................................................. 9

The Acquisition of Gender in Monolingual Children ................................................................... 11

Chapter 3: The Acquisition of Gender in Bilingual Children ....................................................... 17

Theoretical Framework ................................................................................................................. 17

Cross-Language Transfer .............................................................................................................. 22

Chapter 4: The Present Research .................................................................................................. 27

Background of French Immersion in Canada ............................................................................... 28

Chapter 5: Study 1 ........................................................................................................................ 31

Method .......................................................................................................................................... 31

Results ........................................................................................................................................... 38

Discussion ..................................................................................................................................... 49

v

Chapter 6: Study 2 ........................................................................................................................ 55

Method .......................................................................................................................................... 55

Results ........................................................................................................................................... 59

Discussion ..................................................................................................................................... 64

Chapter 7: Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 67

Limitations and Future Research .................................................................................................. 67

Educational and Theoretical Implications .................................................................................... 68

References ..................................................................................................................................... 70

Appendix A ................................................................................................................................... 80

Appendix B ................................................................................................................................... 81

Appendix C ................................................................................................................................... 85

Appendix D ................................................................................................................................... 90

Appendix E ................................................................................................................................... 91

vi

List of Tables

Table 1. Frequency Distribution of Language Background .......................................................... 33

Table 2. Frequency Distribution of Maternal Education .............................................................. 33

Table 3. Descriptive Statistics of Measures .................................................................................. 40

Table 4. The median number of gender-neutral responses as a function of grade and task. ........ 41

Table 5. Frequency Distribution of Language Background .......................................................... 58

Table 6. Frequency Distribution of Maternal Education .............................................................. 58

Table 7. Descriptive Statistics of Measures .................................................................................. 61

vii

List of Figures

Figure 1. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses in the picture task for biased

pseudowords as a function of grade. ............................................................................................. 42

Figure 2. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 2. 44

Figure 3. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 4. 44

Figure 4. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 6. 45

Figure 5. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses in the determiner task for biased

pseudowords a function of grade. ................................................................................................. 46

Figure 6. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 2. 47

Figure 7. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 4. 48

Figure 8. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 6. 48

Figure 9. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses (with standard error bars) in the

picture task for biased pseudowords as a function of language. ................................................... 62

Figure 10. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses (with standard errors bars) in the

determiner task for biased pseudowords as a function of language. ............................................. 63

viii

List of Appendices

Appendix A List of pseudowords ................................................................................................. 80

Appendix B The Determiner Task ................................................................................................ 81

Appendix C The Picture Task ....................................................................................................... 85

Appendix D Martians used in the Picture Task ............................................................................ 90

Appendix E Bias Value Calculations Obtained from the Lexique Database ................................ 91

1

Chapter 1 : Introduction

Le problème or La problème? Every individual whose language marks grammatical

gender has encountered the gender assignment problem, at least once. Grammatical gender, also

called noun class, and hereafter referred to simply as gender, may be defined following

Guillelmon & Grosjean (2001): “A subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun,

adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable

characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement

with and selection of other words or grammatical forms” (p. 503) (Webster’s Ninth New

Collegiate Dictionary, 1991).

In French, for instance, nouns are either masculine (e.g., bateau, ‘boat’) or feminine (e.g.,

fenêtre, ‘window’). Conversely, English does not assign grammatical gender to nouns and there

is no gender agreement between nouns and their modifiers (e.g., adjectives, articles, and

determiners). Interestingly, to the native French speaker, gender-marking ability appears to be an

innate ability. When asked about this peculiar skill, a typical explanation to account for this

capability is: “through experience, one just knows it, that’s all” (Tucker, 1968, p. 5). In contrast

to the “linguistic myopia” (Tucker, 1968, p. 6) of the native French speaker, second language

learners (L2) of French, especially those whose first language (L1) lacks gender, are quick to

realize that gender-marking may be the most challenging feature to acquire in the French

language. Under this premise, native speakers of English (and other non-gendered languages

such as, Chinese) must learn the French words for things in addition to whether the words are

masculine or feminine (Tucker, 1968).

2

With this in mind, one may inquire, do L2 speakers make use of their L1 that marks

gender when learning another gendered language? In other words, if two languages (e.g.,

Spanish and French) share gender marking as a linguistic feature, are L2 learners able to transfer

the strategies learned from their L1 into their L2? Moreover, gender-marking ability may be

affected more by the structural similarity of gender between the first language and an additional

language than by the mere presence of gender features in the L1. For example, French and

Russian are two languages that share gender-marking traits. Although both languages mark

gender, they do not share the same number of subclasses within their gender system (i.e., French

has a two-tiered masculine-feminine system as opposed to Russian, which has a three-tiered

masculine-feminine-neuter system). Therefore, another question one may ask is whether the

typological distance between the L1 and the L2 influences the accuracy of gender marking

abilities.

Language proficiency is a multidimensional concept. As such, various non-linguistic

skills might relate with linguistic proficiency in different spheres (Slevc & Miyake 2006, as cited

in Serratrice, 2013). According to Surridge and Lesssard (2008), of the 40 pages devoted to the

study of gender, only one or two pages are dedicated to a systematic explanation of how one can

determine the gender of a particular noun in French. Furthermore, since correct gender marking

is rarely essential for comprehension of the message, it carries a low ‘communicative load’

(Harley, 1993; Warden, 1997). For instance, L2 learners can still understand each other without

paying attention to determiners. In fact, teachers may be unwilling to interrupt the flow of the

conversation in order to correct for gender errors, an example of a non-linguistic factor that may

affect grammatical competence in the domain of morphosyntax (Harley, 1993).

3

The rationale for this investigation came from several avenues of observations. First,

native speakers of French attribute gender to nouns unerringly and with celerity, yet are unable to

explain the specific processes that undergird this feature of their language (Tucker, 1968).

Second, French as additional language learners, even those who have acquired near native

proficiency still seem to struggle when it comes to gender assignment (Holmes & Dejean de la

Bâtie, 1999). Third, research concerning the acquisition of gender in monolingual and

simultaneous bilingual children has been inconclusive in regards to the specific factors that

might account for this well-developed skill (Grüter, Lew-Williams, & Fernald, 2012). The study

of gender has been investigated across different disciplines (i.e., applied psycholinguistics,

language and cognition, cognitive development, developmental disabilities etc.) yet the junction

between the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings remains unclear. Finally, while learning

French as my third language (L3), I believe that I was able to somewhat benefit from the three-

tiered masculine-feminine-neuter system present in my L1. Considering my personal experience

as a sequential trilingual, I was curious about the benefits of additive bilingualism in regards to

gender marking. As a result of increasing international mobility, children are being exposed to

two or more languages simultaneously. Given their diversity of linguistic experience,

multilingual children should not be considered as one homogeneous group. It is important for

researchers, educators and clinicians to consider their various linguistic, cultural and educational

backgrounds in language learning. This thesis consists of two interrelated studies. In Study 1, the

impact of morphophonological cues (carried by the endings of some nouns) on gender

assignment in French was examined in a cross-sectional design. Study 2 investigated the same

relationship as a function of whether the L1 marks gender or does not mark gender among three

groups of French immersion students: children whose home language marks gender (e.g.,

Spanish), children whose home language is a language other than English that does not mark

4

gender (e.g., Chinese) and English-first language children. Hence, French was a third language

for the first two groups and a second language for the final group.

This thesis comprises seven chapters. In Chapter 1, the rationale for the current work is

laid out. An overview of the grammatical gender system (with an emphasis on French) and a

review of the empirical studies concerning the acquisition of gender agreement in monolingual

children are presented in Chapter 2. A review of the relevant theoretical frameworks that are

pertinent to the present research, along with a survey of the empirical studies concerning the

acquisition of gender agreement in bilingual children are discussed in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, I

will then address the two studies encompassing this thesis along with background information on

French immersion programs in Canada. The studies are then reported in Chapters 5 and 6,

respectively, along with a detailed discussion of the results. To conclude, Chapter 7 presents a

general discussion of the studies, their theoretical and educational implications, and directions

for future research.

5

Chapter 2: The Grammatical Gender System

In this section, I begin by discussing the classification of the grammatical gender system.

Next, the grammatical structure of the French language is described. Finally, I conclude with a

review of the literature concerning the acquisition of gender agreement in monolingual children

(with particular emphasis on French).

Grammatical Gender

In a typological survey, Nichols (1992) found that of 174 languages, over one fourth

marked grammatical gender. The word ‘gender’ derives from Latin genus via Old French

gendre, originally meaning ‘kind’ or ‘sort’(Corbett, 2006, p. 749). In a more concrete sense,

every noun falls into two or more classes, such that noun subclass membership controls the form

of other syntactic categories that modify it or substitute for it (Hockett, 1958; Holmes & Dejean

de la Bâtie, 1999).

There are two components that make up the gender system of a language: gender

assignment (i.e., attributing a particular gender class to each noun) and gender agreement (i.e.,

concord between the noun and its syntactic elements, such as determiners). Grammatical gender

systems vary cross-linguistically on a number of dimensions, including the number of noun

subclasses (Comrie, 1999). There are four main noun subclasses across languages: masculine-

feminine, masculine-feminine-neuter, common-neuter and animate-inanimate, with few or no

nouns occurring in more than one class (Corbett, 1991). Romance languages (French, Italian,

Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish) are examples of a two-tiered masculine-feminine gender

system (e.g., chapeauMASC, ‘hat’; maisonFEM, ‘house’ for French). On the other hand, the

masculine-feminine-neuter subclass is typical of the Slavic languages (e.g., Polish). This system

is similar to the masculine-feminine system, except that there is an additional gender available

6

(neuter) for unspecified sex referents (e.g., stółMASC ‘table’; książkaFEM ‘book’; dzieckoNEUT

‘child’). The common-neuter system is found in languages such as Danish, Dutch, and Swedish.

For example, in Dutch, nouns denoting people are of common gender (e.g., politicusCOM

‘politician’) whereas, other nouns (e.g., voorhoofdNEUT ‘forehead’) are of neuter gender

(Sabourin, Stowe, & de Haan, 2006). Finally, Basque is an example of a language with a two-

tiered gender system that differentiates between animate and inanimate objects (Corbett, 1991).

In contrast, English does not mark grammatical gender (except for semantic gender

reflected by third person pronouns such as his or her and the endings of a few nouns which refer

to male or female entities such as, actor vs. actress) and no gender agreement (Laaha & Gillis,

2007 as cited in, Schwartz et al., 2014; Sera et al., 2002). One of the three groups of children

who participated in Study 2 of this thesis was comprised of speakers of languages characterized

by a two-tiered (masculine-feminine) (e.g., Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, and Urdu) or a three-

tiered (masculine-feminine-neuter) system (Russian, Polish, and Slovak) for marking gender.

The remaining groups were comprised of speakers of languages such as English, Farsi, and

Tamil. None of these languages mark gender.

Gender Agreement

An important characteristic of gendered languages is gender agreement. Concord, or

agreement is a syntactic property that refers to the gender and number marking (e.g., singular or

plural) between syntactic categories (i.e., adjectives, determiners, numerals, past participles and

pronouns) as a function of the noun they co-occur with (Grüter et al., 2012). The French

language is a ‘head-first language’, meaning that the central element of the phrase (i.e., head

noun) precedes other syntactic categories (Mitchell, Myles, Marsden, 2013). In French, the noun

of the nominal phrase determines the gender and number of its modifiers. For example, leMASC

7

petit garçon means ‘the little boy’, whereas, laFEM petite fille means ‘the little girl’. In this

example, the definite article (le/la) and the adjective (petit/petite) change their form according to

the gender of the noun. Grammatical gender systems vary in terms of the range of syntactic

categories affected by gender agreement (Boloh & Ibernon, 2010). More specifically, in French,

determiners and adjectives are the most frequent syntactic categories that are inflected for gender

(Warden, 1997). There are multiple sources of information that children can use in determining

the gender of a noun namely, semantic cues (whether the noun’s gender is congruent with natural

gender), morphophonological cues (carried by the noun’s ending) and morphosyntactic cues

(carried by modifiers related to the nouns such as, determiners) (Corbett, 1991). The main focus

of this thesis was on gender assignment in French. Specifically, the studies examined the role of

morphophonological cues in gender attribution using two elicited production measures. Elicited

production is an experimental technique designed to tap children’s grammatical ability by having

them produce specific sentence structures (Thornton, 1996).

Gender Assignment Principles

There are two major principles involved in gender assignment: semantic principles and

formal principles (Comrie, 1999). According to the formal principle, nouns are assigned to

gender according to their form, for example, in Spanish, nouns ending in -o are masculine (e.g.,

libro ‘book’), while the majority of nouns ending in –a are feminine (e.g., casa ‘house’)

(Comrie, 1999). However, no language is based purely on formal rules (Corbett, 1991).

According to the semantic principle, nouns denoting male entities are masculine, while those

denoting female entities are feminine. All remaining nouns are neuter, which suggests that

assignment rules in a semantic gender system are transparent. That said, Romance languages do

not feature the neuter subclass, and thus, all inanimate nouns are classified as either masculine or

feminine (Warden, 1997).

8

In some languages such as Dyirbal, an Australian Aboriginal language, gender

assignment is dominated by the semantic gender system, which applies biological cues to

distinguish between nouns (Corbett, 1991; Tsimpli & Hulk, 2013). In other languages, such as

French, Russian, Spanish and Swahili, gender assignment is determined by a combination of

semantic and formal rules (Montrul & Potowski, 2007). For example, in French, the semantic

principle still applies in cases where biological information is a salient feature of the noun (e.g.,

maman ‘mom’ is feminine). Although semantic cues are pertinent to the assignment of nouns

denoting human entities, in French, grammatical gender corresponds to natural gender in only

about 10% of nouns (Corbett, 1991; Séguin, 1969). For example, témoin ‘witness’ is masculine

whether it refers to males or females, and victime ‘victim’ and personne ‘person’ are feminine

whether they refer to males or females (Boloh & Ibernon, 2013). Moreover, nouns whose

referents are not naturally gendered are nonetheless assigned to one or the other gender category

(Grevisse, 1980). Hence, morphophonological cues (based on the noun’s ending) and

morphosyntactic rules (based on the modifier) may be useful when attributing gender to nouns.

The Gender System in French

In French, the target language of the present study, all nouns are assigned to either the

masculine or feminine gender class. For example, leMASC livre, ‘the book’ is a masculine noun

whereas laFEM maison ‘the house’ is a feminine noun. Interestingly, according to Séguin (1969)

approximately 58.4% of French nouns are masculine. Although the French gender attribution

system is opaque and arbitrary (Corbett, 1991), morphophonological cues (carried by the endings

of some nouns) may serve as a useful strategy in noun subclass assignment (Lyster, 2006). For

example, nouns ending with -age are usually masculine (leMASC fromage, ‘the cheese’) but there

are some exceptions, such as uneFEM image, ‘a picture’, laFEM plage, ‘the beach’, and laFEM page,

‘the page’. Similarly, nouns ending with –ion are usually feminine (laFEM station, ‘the station’),

9

yet unMASC avion, ‘a plane’, unMASC lion, ‘a lion’, and unMASC camion, ‘a truck’ are masculine.

Furthermore, the majority of compound words take the gender of the head noun, except for

combinations of nouns with verbs and prepositions, which are generally masculine, such as

porte-monnaie ‘coin purse’ (Andriamamonjy, 2000; Price, 2008). Likewise, there are about 50

nouns that appear in both genders but with different meanings (l’Huillier,1999 as cited in

Presson & Whinney, 2014; Price, 2008). For example, physique is masculine when it refers to a

person’s appearance and feminine when it refers to the science of physics (Presson & Whinney,

2014). Yet despite these apparent regularities, the French gender system has many exceptions,

and thus, prototypical morphophonological cues are not fully reliable in predicting the subclass

of a given noun.

Processing in Gender Assignment

In the literature on the acquisition of grammatical gender, there is a growing body of

research concerning two models for gender assignment: the lexical route and the form-based

route (Gollan & Frost, 2001; Hohlfeld, 2006; Schriefers & Jescheniak 1999). According to the

lexical route, gender for each noun is stored at the lemma (word) level, part of one’s mental

lexicon (dictionary) (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999; Roelofs, 1992

as cited in, Hohlfeld, 2006) whereas, morphophonological information is obtained at the lexeme

(basic unit of meaning) level. By implication, gender information is retrieved earlier than

phonological information. For example, this process is supported by reports of patients who have

suffered from brain damage, who can often identify the gender of the word that they want to use

without being able to utter the word itself (Holmes & Segui, 2004). Hence, morphophonological

information (carried by word endings) may play a secondary role to lexical items in assigning

gender (Holmes & Dejean de la Bâtie, 1999). On the other hand, the premise of the form-based

route (e.g., the ‘reliable cue hypothesis’ proposed by Gollan & Frost, 2001) is that if nouns are

10

marked by morphophonological information they will be accessed more quickly than nouns that

are not marked by formal regularities. Applying such a framework, Desrochers and colleagues

found that native French speakers retrieved gender information more quickly and accurately for

words with gender-typical endings than for words with unbiased endings (Desrochers & Paivio,

1990; Taft & Meunier, 1998).

At the same time, Hohlfeld (2006) suggested that the lexical route and the form-based

route worked in tandem. She conducted an experiment in which native German speakers

determined the gender of nouns in an online gender assignment task. The stimuli consisted of

transparent masculine nouns (e.g., –ling, Findling ‘foundling’), transparent feminine nouns (e.g.,

-heit, Klugheit, ‘cleverness’), neuter nouns (e.g., -chen, Glöckchen, ‘bell’) and various non-

transparent nouns with unbiased endings (e.g., Atlas, ‘atlas’). The results indicated that there was

no difference in the speed of gender assignment between transparent and non-transparent nouns.

As expected, participants employed the lexical route when determining the gender of ‘real’

words. In a follow-up study, the accessibility of the mental lexicon was blocked by the

introduction of nonwords. The participants were asked to assign gender to transparent (e.g.,

Gremsling*)1 and opaque pseudowords (e.g., Tompeff*). The results revealed that there was no

difference in processing between transparent and opaque pseudowords. However, participants

relied on the form-focused route (i.e., reliable gender cues) for nonwords, given that they did not

have an entry in their mental lexicon for these words. Furthermore, these results support Gollan

and Frost’s (2001) ‘lexical checking’ hypothesis. In other words, by default (in the case of real

words), gender is stored in and activated from the mental lexicon. However,

morphophonological information (based on the noun’s ending), is used as a checking procedure

1 An asterisk refers to an invented noun throughout this thesis.

11

when processing incongruent information (such as pseudowords) from the lexicon

(Mastropavlou & Tsimpli, 2011).

The Acquisition of Gender in Monolingual Children

The gender attribution problem has been at the centre of many studies on gender

acquisition in monolingual children (e.g., Holmes & Dejean de la Bâtie, 1999; Karmiloff-Smith,

1979; Seigneuric, Zagar, Meunier, & Spinelli, 2007; Tucker, Lambert, & Rigault, 1977). A

general trend that can be observed from the literature on French L1 gender acquisition is that by

the age of 3, native speakers make almost no gender attribution errors (Clark, 1985; Karmiloff-

Smith, 1979). In particular, studies in various domains of developmental language research have

shown that gender assignment is based on the ability to determine whether the word ending is

typical for a particular gender on the basis of its nominal endings/suffixes (Holmes & Dejean de

la Bâtie, 1999; Holmes & Segui, 2004; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Lyster, 2006; Séguin, 1969;

Tucker et al., 1977).

In the subsequent section, some of the prominent studies that support the form-based

route (gender is assigned via morphophonological information) are surveyed. In a pioneering

study on the development of gender-marking ability, Tucker et al. (1977) hypothesized that

native French speakers use morphophonological rules while assigning gender to nouns on the

basis of their endings. In a series of four studies, the researchers presented French speakers

between the ages of seven and seventeen with a number of pseudonouns whose endings were

typically masculine or typically feminine. The corpus used for this study resulted from a search

of 26,725 nouns in the Petit Larousse dictionary. Noun frequency computations were generated

from Quemada’s (1971) inverse dictionary listing all 31,619 nouns in the Petit Larousse sorted

by noun ending and separated according to gender (Lyster, 2006). Participants were explicitly

12

asked to identify the gender of the noun by circling the indefinite determiner, unMASC or uneFEM.

In one condition, the participants read the words before listening to a recording of them. In the

second condition, the subjects only heard the words, but did not see them. The researchers found

that participants attributed gender to nouns on the basis of their typical endings. For example,

96% of nouns ending in –ette are feminine (e.g., cigarette ‘cigarette’) and 99% of nouns ending

in –ain are masculine (e.g., train ‘train’). This finding served as evidence for a set of rules that

were used to determine the grammatical gender of nouns on the basis of morphophonological

cues. The authors proposed a ‘backward processing’ strategy whereby native speakers actively

process the word from right to left, before assigning the noun to a particular subclass.

In the same vein, Lyster (2006) examined a corpus of 9,961 nouns appearing in the

Robert Junior’s illustrated dictionary designed for 8-12 year old children. An ending was

considered a reliable predictor of gender, if it predicted at least 90 per cent of all nouns in the

corpus with that ending. For example, nouns ending with -age are typically masculine (leMASC

fromage, ‘the cheese’) but there are some exceptions, such as uneFEM image, ‘a picture’ and

laFEM plage, ‘the beach’. Similarly, nouns ending with –ion are typically feminine (laFEM station,

‘the station’), yet unMASC avion, ‘a plane’and unMASC lion, ‘a lion’ are masculine. Aside from

this, some endings are ambiguous, which means that they occur in both genders, for example

nouns ending in –ique are feminine about 60% of the time (Holmes & Segui, 2004). The results

indicated that approximately, 80 per cent of all nouns have endings that systematically predict

their gender. In contrast to noun endings, the beginning of nouns are not as reliable (Holmes &

Dejean de la Bâtie, 1999). For example, looking at nouns with similar beginnings such as,

moucheFEM ‘fly’ and mouchoirMASC ‘tissue’, yields no important information concerning the

noun’s gender (Tucker, 1968).

13

In contrast to the corpus data obtained from dictionaries, elicited production measures

have been designed to assess children’s grammatical ability. In a seminal study, Karmiloff-Smith

(1979) conducted several experiments to evaluate the relative importance of gender cues to

determine the gender of invented nouns. According to the researcher’s hypothesis, in the early

stages of gender acquisition, children assume that grammatical gender is based on natural

gender. However, as children get older and become more experienced with the target language,

they start to pay attention to morphophonological cues. The participants in Karmiloff-Smith’s

(1979) study were 341 French monolingual children between the ages of 3 and 12. To examine

the role of morphophonological cues in gender assignment, Karmiloff-Smith (1979) manipulated

the determiner and the pseudoword’s suffix in two conditions: congruent (e.g., unMASC bicron*

in which the masculine indefinite determiner is consistent with the masculine noun ending –on)

and incongruent (e.g., uneFEM bicron* in which the feminine indefinite determiner is inconsistent

with the typically masculine noun ending –on). In the latter case, the child was presented with

two sources of conflicting information and had to make a decision based on the information

provided by the determiner or the noun’s ending. To investigate whether morphophonological

cues could activate semantic features of the corresponding gender class, children were shown

pictures depicting males or females (with no gender marked determiner) that were either

consistent with the noun’s suffix (e.g., two males referred to as deux bicrons*) or inconsistent

with the noun’s ending (e.g., two females referred to as deux bicrons*). Again, in the

inconsistent condition, the children were required to make a decision between the semantic

component and morphophonological cue. In both tasks, the participant’s gender-marking ability

was measured implicitly.

Taken together, the results from Karmiloff-Smith’s (1979) study revealed that children as

young as 3 years of age assigned gender to invented nouns on the basis of morphophonological

14

cues. In particular, when the participants were presented with conflicting evidence between

indefinite articles and semantic features that contradicted morphophonological cues (word

endings), children opted for the latter to determine the gender of the invented word. Interestingly,

there was “a tendency to attribute masculine gender to all unknown words, despite the potential

feminine phonological clue on the suffix” (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979, p. 159 as cited in Larrañaga

& Guijarro-Fuentes, 2013) for children who were 9 years of age or older. Nevertheless,

Karmiloff-Smith (1979) concluded that morphophonological cues prevailed across all age

groups.

More recently, the role of morphophonological cues and semantic features in gender-

marking ability have been explored by Seigneuric et al. (2007). The participants in this study

consisted of 144 native French children between the ages of 3 and 9. In the ‘determiner

condition’, participants were required to indicate gender class by orally providing the determiner

(unMASC or uneFEM) for invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically

feminine or neutral. In the ‘picture condition’, children assigned gender to invented nouns by

pointing to the picture of a female or male Martian. In terms of the first task, the results

corroborated the findings reported by Karmiloff-Smith (1979) as the ability to assign gender to

pseudowords on the basis of endings increased with age with scores of 60% at age 3 and 82% at

age 9. At the same time, morphophonological cues activated the semantic features of the

corresponding gender class, as performance increased with age and was greater than chance level

at the age of 4.

There is a growing body of research that has looked at gender assignment using real time

processing techniques. In a study by Holmes and Segui (2004), the researchers were interested

in determining whether sublexical cues (i.e., ending typicality) and lexical cues (i.e.,

15

determiners) influence gender assignment. In the first experiment, known as ‘gender

classification’, participants (40 native speakers of French between the ages of 20 to 37 years)

were presented with a single noun and were asked to press a key corresponding to either the

masculine or the feminine. In the second task, known as ‘phrase verification’, the subjects

verified whether the determiner-noun phrase was acceptable or not (by judging the indefinite

article that was employed with the noun), by pressing an affirmative or negative key. Holmes

and Segui (2004) reported longer reaction times when both word endings and the determiner

were inconsistent, compared to shorter reaction times when both were consistent. The results

corroborated the post-lexical checking hypothesis (Gollan & Frost, 2001), which states that

people process both sublexical and lexical cues in tandem, “without any additional boost when

both sources were helpful” (Holmes & Segui, 2004, p. 437).

Finally, more recently, Melançon and Shi (2015) explored grammatical representations in

French monolingual 30-month-olds. In the training phase, toddlers were simultaneously taught

word-object pairs with familiar words and pseudowords (which did not contain phonologically

biased markings of gender) and their gender marked determiners (e.g., unMASC ravole*). In the

gender congruent test phase, ravole* occurred with another masculine determiner (e.g., leMASC

ravole*). In the gender incongruent test phase, ravole* occurred with a feminine determiner

(e.g., laFEM ravole*). Finally, in the neutral trial, the target noun succeeded a gender-unmarked

determiner (e.g., lesPLUR ravoles*). Melançon and Shi (2015) calculated the proportion of looking

time by dividing the total looking time to the target word by the sum of looking time to the target

and the distractor. The results showed that performance was better (i.e., shorter looking times) in

gender-matched trials compared to gender-unmarked trials, and recognition of the target word

was most hindered in gender-mismatched trials. Moreover, there was no difference in processing

time for gender-matched trials across real words and pseudowords. According to Melançon and

16

Shi (2015), “grammatical gender is not tied to familiar words, rather, the feature is represented

abstractly across all relevant words in the lexicon” (p. 13) and can be applied to invented words.

To recapitulate, the literature on gender acquisition in the L1 has demonstrated that the

ability to mark gender is well developed by the age of 3. In addition, the development of gender

appears to be based on the ability to use morphophonological cues (noun endings) as evidenced

by studies that extensively examined words obtained from dictionaries as well as elicited

production measures. Finally, online processing techniques have been designed in order to

examine the underlying processes that underlie gender activation.

17

Chapter 3: The Acquisition of Gender in Bilingual Children

In this section, I will situate the development of grammatical gender within two

prominent theories in the literature, which suggest that second language acquisition might be

contingent on the nature of the L1. Following this, the literature on the acquisition of gender in

bilingual children is framed in terms of two themes. First, from a developmental perspective,

acquisition of gender agreement by second language learners has been shown to mirror the

learning trajectory in L1 speakers, albeit with a delay (Montrul & Potowski, 2007). Second,

research on cross-language transfer is reviewed and its relevance to the study of gender

discussed. In particular, there is some evidence that gender-marking ability acquired in the L1

supports the acquisition of gender in a second language (Sabourin et al., 2006; Schwartz et al.,

2014). Consequently, second language learners whose first language does not mark gender may

develop strategies such as the masculine default, in order to determine the gender of new nouns

(Boloh & Ibernon, 2010; Harris, 1991, Riente, 2003).

Theoretical Framework

According to Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG), the ability to learn

grammar is hard-wired in the brain. The issue that emerged, however, is whether second

language learners have full, partial or no access to UG after the sensitive period (during which

the brain is most likely to strengthen important connections and prune irrelevant ones) (Liceras

2010 as cited in, Serratrice, 2013). Following this line of reasoning, second language learners

rely heavily on their L1 in learning an L2 (Serratrice, 2013). However, to what extent does the

L1 influence second language acquisition? To date, two dominant theories that have framed

grammatical gender learning research include: the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH)

18

(e.g., Hawkins & Chan, 1997) and the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) model (e.g., Schwartz

& Sprouse, 1994; White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska-Macgregor & Leung, 2004).

In contrast to the well-entrenched gender-marking ability of native speakers (by the age

of 3 or 4), the results of several studies on bilingual speakers are somewhat inconsistent as to

whether or not native-like ability can be attained in a second language, even for those at high

levels of proficiency (Holmes & de la Bâtie, 1999; Bartning, 2000; Bruhn de Garavito & White,

2000; Dewaele & Véronique, 2001; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004). In fact, English L1 learners

of French have been shown to make gender mistakes even after many years of instruction

(Andersen, 1984; Surridge, 1993). The FFFH stipulates that learners of a second language who

passed the critical learning period are unable to acquire grammatical features that were not

represented in their L1 (Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004; Franceschina, 2005; see also Carroll,

1989). As a result, the L2 interlanguage (i.e., evolving system of rules regarding the L2)

(Selinker, 1972) is subject to a representational deficit, given that the L1 does not mark gender

(Unsworth, 2008). In a pivotal study, Franceschina (2005) presented Spanish L2 participants (53

adults who spoke an L1 that featured gender and 15 English-first language learners) with a series

of six offline measures. A group of Spanish L1 speakers was also included in the study. In the

first test known as the ‘guessing game’, the participants heard and read sentences that referred to

a noun indirectly such as Los trajo Martín y dijo que son para usted (‘Martin brought them and

said that they were for you’). In this example, los is a masculine modifier (themMASC) and the

participants were asked to select which object it was referring to from the following choices:

flores ‘flowersFEM’, joyas ‘jewelsFEM’ or chocolates ‘chocolatesMASC’. The correct answer is

chocolates, as the other two options are feminine nouns and do not agree with los, which is

masculine. Results showed a significant difference in gender agreement ability in favour of

native speakers compared to the English-first language group. There was no significant

19

difference between native speakers and the group of learners who spoke an L1 with gender.

According to Franceschina (2005), if one’s first language marks gender, native-like mastery of

an L2 gender system (post-sensitive period) is probable, whereas, if the L1 does not have gender,

native-like attainment is unlikely.

According to the FTFA, grammatical features that are nonexistent in the L1 can be

learned with sufficient exposure to the L2, regardless of the age of acquisition (Schwartz &

Sprouse, 1994). For example, White et al. (2004) investigated the comprehension and

production of L2 Spanish gender and number agreement among a group of 48 French L1

speakers and 68 English-first language learners. The participants were taking Spanish courses as

adults and they were grouped according to their level of proficiency (low, intermediate and

advanced). Four tasks were devised for the study: two elicited production tasks, a vocabulary test

and a picture identification task. For example, in the production task, the participants were

consecutively shown three pictures and asked to describe them. In terms of the vocabulary test,

participants were asked to select the masculine or feminine form of an article (elMASC or laFEM)

that corresponded to the image that was being represented. Finally, the picture identification task

was used to assess gender agreement. The participants were asked to select one of three pictures

that matched a particular sentence on gender and number contrasts. For example, María

contesta: “Sí, claro, va a hacer mucho sol. Ponlas ahí cerca de la roja.” (Maria answers: “Yes,

of course, it is going to be very sunny. Put them over there by the red [one]”). In this example, la

is a feminine determiner and roja is the feminine adjective for red. Therefore, the correct

response is laFEM maleta ‘the suitcase’ which is feminine, instead of elMASC libro ‘the book’,

which is masculine or losPLUR calcetines ‘the socks’, which are masculine and plural. The results

revealed differences that were contingent on proficiency; low proficiency groups differed

significantly from native speakers, but there were no significant differences between advanced

20

and intermediate groups (White et al., 2004). Interestingly, exposure to a L1 with gender (e.g.,

French) did not improve performance on gender in the L2 (e.g., Spanish). In this thesis, then, in

accordance with the FTFA, it is hypothesized that with sufficient input in the target language, L2

learners are comparable to L1 speakers in gender marking. However, unlike White et al. (2004),

experience with a L1 that marks gender should place second (or even third) language learners at

an advantage compared with L1 speakers without gender.

Various theories have been articulated to account for the development of gender-marking

ability among bilingual children. Carroll (1989), in her review of gender attribution to nouns in

French, argued that, “endings do not exist.” (p. 563) In other words, native speakers of French

process nouns and their gender specific determiners as “co-indexed chunks” (e.g., lamaison,

‘thehouse’) or as one word. In contrast, Anglophone learners of French process nouns and their

determiner as separate lexical items (e.g., la maison, ‘the house’). Furthermore, L2 learners do

not recognize nominal endings/suffixes as typical for a particular gender. Thus, second language

learners must learn to develop a strategy that could assist them in assigning gender to new nouns.

Under this premise, Carroll (1989) argued that French native-like mastery in gender assignment

was considered improbable due to the absence of gender in the English language.

Holmes and Dejean de la Bâtie (1999) employed an online processing task using real and

invented French words, with typical or atypical endings to compare performance in gender

attribution of first and second language learners of French. In the first condition, the participants

(50 French L2 learners with English as their L1, M = 21.6 years and 44 French L1 speakers, M =

22.3 years) classified words as masculine or feminine. In the second task, the subjects verified

the accuracy of the determiner-noun combination. Native speakers of French took significantly

longer to classify nonwords than regular words (because they engaged in a lexical search).

21

Hence, the results suggest that for native speakers, knowledge of word endings plays a minor

role in gender assignment (Holmes & Dejean de la Bâtie, 1999). As expected, the gender-

marking ability of the L2 speakers was noticeably inferior to that of native speakers.

Interestingly, it appears that non-native speakers compensated for weak lexical associations with

explicit knowledge of word-ending rules during both tasks.

Among gender-marked languages, it appears that one subclass might act as the default

(i.e., learners would be right without having to learn anything at all) (Roca, 1989 as cited in,

Boloh & Ibernon, 2010). In short, the masculine default implies that a feminine noun has

consistently been used with a masculine determiner (Larrañaga & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2013). For

example, among the Romance languages, the literature reveals that the default gender appears to

be masculine in Spanish (Harris, 1991), in Italian (Riente, 2003), as well as in French (Hulk &

Tellier, 1999 as cited in White et al. 2004). Furthermore, overgeneralizing to one of the

subclasses occurred in Dutch (with the common gender as the default value, Sabourin et al.,

2006). Similarly, Cuza and Pérez-Tattam (2014) found evidence of the masculine as a default in

a picture-naming task among a group of Spanish-English bilingual children.

Applying such a framework to French, the masculine subclass, in particular, the definite

determiner leMASC ‘the’ has been shown to act as the default value standing in for its feminine

counterpart, laFEM ‘the’ (Bartning, 2000). The masculine default is a relatively effective strategy

since approximately 58.4% of French nouns are masculine (Séguin, 1969). Hence, in the event

that French speakers encounter novel nouns, they are more likely than chance to assign the word

to the correct subclass following the masculine as a default principle. Boloh and Ibernon (2010)

examined gender agreement errors in monolingual French speakers grouped into four age

categories (e.g., four-year olds, seven-year olds, ten-year olds and adults). The participants were

22

told that they would send new objects to another person (e.g., un/le kibon* ‘a/the kibon*’ or

une/la bajette* ‘a/the bajette’) and that they had to record a message specifying in which bag

each of the three items would be sent. The results supported the masculine as a default strategy,

as scores for masculine endings reached ceiling at all ages, although agreement on feminine

nouns increased with age and reached ceiling (96.85%) at the age of 10. In summary, the

masculine as a default approach appears to be a robust strategy when compared to the use of

morphophonological cues in speakers in the process of acquiring gender agreement.

Cross-Language Transfer

For the purpose of this work, the term cross-language transfer (or transfer) refers to “the

structural influence of one language on another (see Meisel, 1983), regardless of whether the

influence facilitates language acquisition or results in a grammatical construction.” (Nicoladis,

2006, p. 15) In terms of its relevance to the current thesis, transfer is contextualized within two

theoretical frameworks: the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (Lado, 1957) and the Linguistic

Interdependence Hypothesis (Cummins, 1981).

Over the years, the definition of transfer has evolved. Thorndike (1923) concluded that

transfer depends on the existence of ‘identical elements’ in two tasks, and without these identical

elements transfer cannot occur. According to Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (1957), it

is possible to predict which elements of a given L2 will be challenging to learners from a specific

L1 background based on structural (i.e., phonological, morphological, syntactic) similarities and

differences between the L1 and the L2. On the one hand, positive transfer occurs when specific

features in two languages are similar to each other. For instance, gender-marking ability may not

be a difficult skill to master for speakers learning two Romance languages (e.g., laFEM maison

‘the house’, in French, vs. laFEM casa ‘the house’, in Spanish) because the two languages share

23

the same linguistic feature. On the other hand, negative transfer ensues when specific features

differ between two languages such that L2 learners are likely to experience ‘interference’ from

their L1. Hence, gender activation may be difficult for speakers whose first language does not

mark gender (e.g., English). In fact, Carroll (1989) argued that English-speaking children could

not fully acquire the French gender attribution system because English does not have

morphological gender and “there is no trigger for the gender feature of the noun class.” (p. 576)

While the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (Lado, 1957) was based on similarities or

differences between specific linguistic features, the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis

(Cummins, 1981) stated that common underlying proficiencies are shared across languages,

irrespective of the typological distance between them. Based on this framework, L2 learners may

be able to rely on their L1 as a bootstrapping mechanism that supports learning an additional

language. For example, when two languages share a two-tiered gender system (e.g., French and

Spanish), surface features are transferred from one language to the other (Sabourin et al., 2006).

The transfer of abstract features such as two languages that do not share the same number of

noun subclasses is known as deep transfer. In relation to the current study, one of the three

groups of children who participated in Study 2 was comprised of speakers of languages

characterized by a masculine-feminine (e.g., Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, and Urdu) or a

masculine-feminine-neuter (e.g., Russian, Polish, and Slovak) gender system. In other words,

gender-marking ability acquired in the L1 should support the acquisition of gender in the L2,

regardless of the typological distance between the languages. The interdependence hypothesis,

however, has been criticized for its lack of specificity in explaining what is actually being

transferred and the conditions under which its effects occur (Odlin, 2003).

24

To date, a small number of studies have found cross-language transfer effects in learners

of a second language grammatical gender system. In their study, Sabourin et al. (2006) explored

the role of transfer in learning the Dutch gender system among adult speakers of L1 German,

English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish). To examine gender assignment,

participants were asked to make a deCOM or hetNEUT ‘the’ judgment for nouns that varied in terms

of word frequency. German speakers scored the highest, followed by the Romance group,

followed by the English group. All three groups showed an effect for assigning a default gender

(common gender) for middle frequency words. To examine gender agreement, participants were

asked to judge whether a sentence (in which the relative pronoun had the appropriate gender

agreement or an inappropriate gender agreement), was grammatically correct (yes/no decision)

and to correct phrases that were ungrammatical. Once again, German speakers performed the

best, followed by the Romance group performing above chance and the English group

performing at chance. Taken together, the hierarchy of performance on both tasks supports

Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (1957). In other words, German L1 speakers obtained

the highest scores because German and Dutch share specific features. Positive transfer still

occurred for the Romance group, although to a smaller degree, given that the former differ from

Dutch in terms of the composition of noun subclasses. Finally, gender activation may have been

difficult for the English-first language group whose L1 does not mark gender.

In the same vein, Schwartz et al. (2014) examined the acquisition of noun-adjective

gender agreement in Russian by comparing four groups of four- to five-year old bilingual

children from diverse L2 backgrounds (English, Finnish, German, and Hebrew) with age-

matched monolingual children. The researchers employed a semi-structured elicitation task in

Russian, with feminine (e.g., ruka, ‘hand’), masculine nouns (e.g., dom, ‘house’) and neuter

nouns (e.g., okno, ‘window’). Again, children whose L2 marked grammatical gender (i.e.,

25

German, Hebrew) outperformed the children whose L2 did not mark grammatical gender (i.e.,

Finnish, English). From a developmental perspective, the bilingual’s performance was shown to

follow the same learning trajectory as that of monolingual children, albeit with a delay (Schwartz

et al., 2014).

Due to a lack of empirical evidence, the process by which speakers of French as an

additional language learn to mark gender remains unclear. Yet Kuo and Anderson (2010)

recently proposed a theory that serves as a useful framework within which to consider this

question. According to the structural sensitivity theory (2010), having access to two or more

languages renders structural similarities and differences between languages more salient and

thus, more readily learned. Based on this theoretical framework, one would expect that gender-

marking ability would be enhanced among learners of an additional language whose L1 also

marked gender.

Taken together, these results suggest that L2 gender marking is affected more by the

structural similarity between L1 and L2 gender marking than by the mere presence of gender

features in the L1. Thus, in accordance with Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (1957),

positive transfer occurred between German and Dutch (Sabourin et al., 2006), and German and

Russian (Schwartz et al., 2014), as the two language pairs are the most similar in terms of their

grammatical landscapes. For example, German feminine and masculine nouns map onto the

common gender in Dutch and German neuter nouns are also neuter in Dutch. At the same time,

both German and Russian share a three-tiered masculine-feminine-neuter gender system.

Furthermore, although gender marking is a shared linguistic feature between Dutch and

Romance languages (Sabourin et al., 2006), and Russian and Hebrew (Schwartz et al., 2014),

Romance languages (and Hebrew) belong to a two-tiered masculine-feminine gender system,

26

which is often transparent (i.e., morphophonological cues are reliable predictors of gender),

whereas, the Dutch (and Russian) gender systems are opaque (Corbett, 1991). Hence, Romance

(and Hebrew) speakers may have experienced some interference from their L1. In contrast,

English (and Finnish) do not have grammatical gender and are the least similar to Dutch (and

Russian). Therefore, in these two studies, L2 learners acquired gender-marking ability to some

extent but, second language learners whose L1 marked grammatical features had a significant

advantage over children whose L1 did not mark gender.

In sum, there seems to be a debate in the L2 acquisition literature with respect to L1 and

L2 gender marking. Despite the delay, the developmental trajectory is similar, albeit, particular

groups of L2 learners may have an advantage given the presence of gender marking in their L1.

As a result, second language learners may develop strategies, such as the masculine default, in

order to determine the gender of new nouns. To gain insight into the development of gender

marking ability in a second (or third) language, the two studies reported in this thesis

investigated the role of morphophonological cues (based on noun endings) in gender assignment

using pseudowords via an elicited production paradigm among a group of multilingual children

enrolled in an early French immersion program.

27

Chapter 4: The Present Research

The focus of this thesis was on the acquisition of gender assignment in French among

children enrolled in French immersion programs. The participants were sequential bilinguals

who began acquiring French between the ages of 4-5, after developing basic command of their

first language (Meisel, 2001).2 This chapter provides a brief overview of the two studies included

in the current study, along with the specific research questions that were addressed. Finally, it

concludes with a description of French immersion programs in Canada, from which the present

thesis sample was drawn.

The objective of Study 1 was to examine gender-marking development in French across

grades two, four and six among a group of second language learners. While the effects of the L1

have been explored on gender acquisition in the L2, relatively less research has been done on L1

speakers whose first language marks gender, while learning an additional language that marks

gender (e.g., Sabourin et al., 2006; Schwartz et al., 2014). In Study 2, I investigated gender-

marking ability in French, as a function of home language status among three groups of French

immersion students: children whose home language marked gender (e.g., Spanish), children

whose home language is a language other than English that does not mark gender (e.g., Tamil)

and English-first language children. Therefore, French was a third language for the first two

groups and a L2 for the final group. Using an elicited production task modified from Seigneuric

et al. (2007), I examined the role of morphophonological cues carried by a noun’s ending (i.e.,

typically masculine or typically feminine) in gender assignment. In the first task, children

indicated their gender classification by pointing to one of two Martian-like figures that were

2 In the present research, some of the participants spoke neither English nor French at home. For

these children, French was a third language (refer to Study 2).

28

distinguished by secondary sexual features. In the second task, children heard a pseudoword and

were asked to verbally indicate which determiner (unMASC or uneFEM) was the most appropriate

for each item. Both measures employed pseudowords that respected the phonological structure

of French. The advantage of using invented words was that it controlled for children’s prior word

knowledge (Melançon & Shi, 2015).

Study 1 addressed three research questions: (a) Does gender-marking ability increase in

French L2 learners? ; (b) Do morphophonological cues play a role in grammatical gender

assignment? In other words, are French L2 learners more likely to respond consistently with

gender-marked pseudowords that refer to male/female entities (picture task) or

masculine/feminine determiners (determiner task); (c) Is one noun subclass more likely to be

overused than the other in cases where gender-endings are ambiguous? Study 2 addressed the

following research question: (a) Do morphophonological cues play a role in grammatical gender

assignment among French as an additional language learners whose L1 marks gender compared

to students whose L1 does not mark gender?

Background of French Immersion in Canada

As mentioned, the participants in the current thesis were children enrolled in French

immersion programs situated in a metropolitan region. This section presents a brief overview of

English-French bilingual programs in Canada.

In 1969, Canada adopted the Official Languages Act, which ensures access to publicly

funded education in both English and French. The aim of French immersion is additive

bilingualism: the development of French fluency at no expense to the majority English-first

language (Swain & Lapkin, 2005; Wesche, 2002). The inception of the first French immersion

program was a result of English-speaking families who were unhappy with the traditional core

29

French programs (Turnbull, Lapkin, Hart, & Swain, 1998). Throughout Canada (with the

exception of Nunavut), French immersion programs are offered in English language school

systems, in which non-native speakers of French are instructed in French. The popularity of

immersion programs has soared and enrollment in French immersion has increased exponentially

from 45,000 students in 1977 to over 350,000 students by 2011 (Canadian Parents for French,

2011). Generally speaking, French immersion students tend to come from families of middle to

high socio-economic status (SES) (Allen, 2004). Moreover, research has shown that Canadians

who speak both English and French have a higher average salary compared to those who speak

only one of the two languages (Jedwab, 2003).

There are three major variants of French immersion programs in Canada: early

immersion that starts in kindergarten or Grade 1; middle immersion that starts in Grade 4 or 5;

and late immersion that starts in Grade 7. These alternative models differ in terms of age of

intake and the proportion of content-based teaching in English and French (Rebuffot, 1993). In

an early immersion program, all academic content material is taught exclusively in French until

grade 4, when English language arts instruction is initiated for one period each day. Over time,

exposure to English instruction increases and by the end of grade 7 or 8, students may receive up

to 50% of their education in English. In middle immersion, at least 50% of the curriculum is

taught in French from Grade 4 or 5, whereas in late immersion, French language instruction

begins at Grade 7 and up (Lyster, 2008). The participants in the current study were enrolled in an

early immersion program that started in Senior Kindergarten.

With the advent of globalization, recent changes in Canadian demographics, especially in

large urban areas, have lead to increased enrollment of linguistically diverse children in early

French immersion (Sinay, 2010). In fact, English Language Learners (ELLs) comprised 32% of

30

the student body in early French immersion in Canada’s largest school board (Sinay, 2010). In

contrast to the non-English speaking population in the United States, which is predominantly

Spanish (Fleischman et al., 2003), in Canada, ELLs are a rather diverse group. Furthermore,

educators and researchers have applied the term ELL to native-born children as well as to new

immigrants (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2008). Although the sample in the current work was

predominantly Anglophone, those who did speak another language were born in Canada (except

two children) and came from families in which languages other than English or French were

primarily spoken in the home.

As a result of the increasing numbers of ELL’s, educators, researchers, test developers

and clinicians are faced with critical issues such as appropriate identification and intervention for

students who are struggling with language acquisition. Furthermore, many parents of ELL

children are concerned that if their children speak a non-official language at home, they will need

to learn English first before they can thrive in a French immersion program. Despite the rise of

ELLs in French immersion, there is a relative dearth of studies investigating outcomes in English

and French among these students. However, some recent studies examining aspects of language

and reading skills (Au-Yeung et al., 2015; Bérubé & Marinova-Todd, 2012) found that ELL

children performed as well as English L1 children on all the French measures and most of the

English measures, providing strong evidence that French immersion education is a viable option

for ELLs.

31

Chapter 5: Study 1

Study 1 was designed to examine gender assignment in French Immersion children. It had

three objectives. The first objective was to determine whether gender-marking ability improves

with age. The second aim was to investigate the effects of morphophonological cues on gender

assignment by L2 children. The third goal was to examine whether second language learners

defaulted to one noun subclass over the other in instances of ambiguity. In terms of the first

research objective, it was expected that gender-marking ability would improve across the three

grades (consistent with Boloh & Ibernon, 2010; Seigneuric et al., 2007). Thus, children in grade

6 were predicted to score the highest, followed by children in grade 4, followed by children in

grade 2. As for the second research goal, it was anticipated that morphophonological cues would

be used for gender attribution when a noun’s termination was typical for its gender in both the

determiner task (e.g., -otteFEM as in uneFEM blaquotte* ‘a blaquotte*’) and the picture task (e.g.,

-our as in lucadour* representing a male Martian). Furthermore, more ending-consistent

responses were expected for biased feminine pseudowords compared to biased masculine

pseudowords (Seigneuric et al., 2007; Karmiloff-Smith 1979). Finally, in terms of the third

research objective, it was expected that children across all grades, would overuse one subclass

over the other when presented with pseudowords with non-typical endings in both tasks.

Method

Participants

A total of 148 children (M = 114.66 months, SD = 19.69, 59 males) were recruited from six

public French immersion elementary schools in working to middle class neighbourhoods. There

were 46 children in grade 2 (M = 89.89 months, SD = 3.77, 16 males), 47 children in grade 4 (M

= 113.09, SD = 3.68, 20 males), and 55 children in grade 6 (M = 136.73, SD = 3.29, 23 males).

32

The children began French language and literacy instruction simultaneously in the fall of Senior

Kindergarten. All academic content material was taught entirely in French, with partial English

instruction beginning in Grade 4. While French was the sole language of instruction in school for

all of the participants, English was the dominant language of the broader community. As a result,

the children did not have much opportunity to hear and speak French outside of the classroom,

which implied that any differences in French were attributed to the children’s language abilities.

Informal observations (e.g. during recess or on the playground) indicated that the children had

acquired conversational proficiency in English.

The parents completed a demographic questionnaire designed by the researchers. Table 1

displays the frequency distribution for language background. The majority of the children

(95.3%) spoke English most often in the home. Of the 148 children, 126 spoke English more

than 75% of the time. Within the group of 148 children, 30 children learned to speak a language

other than English as the first language (L1), of which 7 reported speaking their mother tongue

most often in the home. The languages spoken among these children were Arabic, Mandarin,

Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Tamil and Urdu (all ns = 1). All of the children had at least 10

books at home, with the majority (62%) having more than 100 books. Approximately, 43% of

parents reported that they read with their child almost everyday and about 72% of the children

engaged in daily independent reading. The frequency distribution of maternal education is

reported in Table 2. In this sample, approximately, 90% of mothers had obtained at least a

college/university degree.3 The majority of children were born in Canada (90%) and 10% were

born elsewhere (n = 15).

3 Four participants did not respond to this question.

33

Table 1. Frequency Distribution of Language Background

Language Frequency Percent (%)

Child's most often spoken language in the home

English 141 95.3

Other 7 4.7

Total 148 100

Child's first language he/she learned to speak at home

Arabic 1 .7

English 118 79.7

English/Spanish 1 .7

English/Chinese 2 1.4

English/Urdu 3 2.0

English/Arabic 1 .7

English/Welsh 1 .7

Farsi 1 .7

Filipino 1 .7

French 1 .7

Greek 1 .7

Korean 2 1.4

Mandarin 2 1.4

Polish 2 1.4

Portuguese 1 .7

Russian 1 .7

Russian/English 1 .7

Slovak 1 .7

Spanish 2 1.4

Tamil 3 2.0

Tibetan 1 .7

Urdu 1 .7

Total 148 100

Table 2. Frequency Distribution of Maternal Education

Level of Education Frequency Percent (%)

Some High School 1 .7

Completed High School 4 2.8

Some College/University 10 6.9

Completed College/University 53 36.8

Professional Degree/Certificate 40 27.8

Post-Graduate Degree (Master's, Doctorate, Law) 36 25

Total 144 100

34

Measures

The picture task. In this task, children indicated their gender classification by pointing to

the picture of a Martian-like female or male figure. First, it was ensured that children were able

to differentiate the sex of each object represented in the picture. The instructions were as follows:

Regarde ces deux images. C’est un couple de personnes imaginaires. Montre-moi le garçon et la

fille. Écoute le mot flaison*. C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

flaison*? (Look at these pictures. This is a couple of imaginary beings (Martian-like persons).

Show me the girl and show me the boy. Listen to the invented word flaison*. Who would you

prefer to call flaison* between these two imaginary persons?). In this example, the correct

response is the female Martian because aison is a typically feminine ending. A total of 20

pseudowords were used. Of these, 6 had typically masculine endings (-eau, -ier, -in, -isme, -on, -

our), 6 had typically feminine endings (-aine, -elle, -ette, -ine, -otte, -ure), and 8 had unbiased

endings (-èle, -ide, -ige, -ique, -ode, -one, -oque, -ule). If the picture (male or female Martian)

and the typically marked pseudoword agreed in gender (e.g., female Martian for nasprelle*),

gender assignment on the pseudoword was considered correct and it was assigned 1 point. If the

picture and the typically marked pseudoword disagreed in gender (e.g., male Martian for

nasprelle*), the error was scored as 0. There was no correct or incorrect response for

pseudowords that were not marked for gender. The examiner was asked to circle the student’s

response (i.e., a male or female Martian). The average length of words was equated across

nominal endings: 8 letters for the masculine pseudowords, 9.5 letters for the feminine

pseudowords, and 8.8 letters for the neutral pseudowords.

35

The determiner task. In this task, children were provided with a pseudoword without any

determiner and then they were asked to repeat it. Next, the experimenter asked the children to

verbally provide the determiner unMASC or uneFEM that was the most appropriate for each

pseudoword. The instructions were as follows: J’ai inventé des nouveaux mots. Voici dostral*.

Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préférerais dire un dostral* ou une dostral*? (I have

invented new words. This is dostral*. Can you please repeat the word? Do you prefer to say a

(masculine) dostral* or a (feminine) dostral*?). In this example, the correct response is unMASC

because –al is a typically masculine ending. The experimenter was instructed to emphasize the

distinction between unMASC and une FEM when addressing the children. The order in which the

two possible responses were proposed was counterbalanced across items. A total of 20

pseudowords were used. Of these, 6 had typically masculine endings (-eau, -ier, -in, -isme, -on, -

our), 6 had typically feminine endings (-aine, -elle, -ette, -ine, -otte, -ure), and 8 had unbiased

endings (-èle, -ide, -ige, -ique, -ode, -one, -oque, -ule). If the determiner and the typically marked

pseudoword agreed in gender (e.g., uneFEM fralocture*), gender on the determiner was

considered correct and was assigned 1 point. If the determiner and the typically marked

pseudoword disagreed in gender (e.g., unMASC fralocture*), the error was scored as 0. There was

no correct or incorrect response for pseudowords that were not marked for gender. The examiner

was asked to circle the student’s response (i.e., either unMASC / uneFEM). The average length of

words was equated across nominal endings: 8.5 letters for the masculine pseudowords, 8.7 letters

for the feminine pseudowords, and 8.4 letters for the neutral pseudowords.

All of the stimuli obeyed the phonological structure of French and began with a consonant.

In this analysis, noun endings referred to the last 2-3 phonemes that set the gender-predictive

values at .75 (Spalek, Franck, Schriefers, & Frauenfelder, 2008 as cited in Boloh & Ibernon,

2010). The bias value of each ending was founded on the data provided by Tucker et al. (1977)

36

and was confirmed by further analysis using the Lexique database (New, Pallier, Ferrand &

Matos, 2001). Word frequency estimates were reported for each lemma based on the frequency

of usage per million words (i.e., the number of times each lemma appeared in a corpus of books

per 1 million words of text).4 The bias value was calculated by filtering through real words with

the ending in question. Next, the nouns with the respective endings were separated by gender

(masculine/feminine). The predictive value (extent to which noun endings accurately predict

gender attribution) was obtained by dividing the number of masculine and feminine nouns for

each ending relative to the total number of nouns in that category within the corpus (Lyster,

2006). For example, there were 430 nouns that ended with the typically feminine ending –ette in

the Lexique database. Of these nouns, 412 were feminine (mean frequency of 3.31 per million of

words) and 18 were masculine (mean frequency of .89 per million of words). Therefore, the bias

score indicated that 96% of words that ended in –ette were typically feminine (i.e., 412/430

*100). For nouns with typical endings, bias values towards either masculinity or femininity

ranged from 72% to 100%, with a mean of 93% for masculine nouns and 91% for feminine

nouns. For nouns with neutral endings, bias values towards femininity ranged from 31% to 66%,

with a mean of 51% for masculine nouns and a mean of 49% for feminine nouns.

Control Measures

French receptive vocabulary. French receptive vocabulary was assessed using the

Échelle de Vocabulaire en Images Peabody (EVIP Form A; Dunn, Theriault-Whalen, & Dunn,

1993), which was standardized on Canadian children who were native speakers of French. The

4 The Lexique corpus was based on 14.7 million words obtained from 218 literary texts that were

published between 1950 and 2000 (New, Pallier, Ferrand & Matos, 2001).

37

test was administered according to standardized procedures. In this task, the examiner presented

a target word orally and the child was asked to identify the picture that best represented the word

from a set of four pictures. Children were given three practice items prior to the test items to

ensure understanding of the task. The measure was discontinued when the child made six errors

within a set of eight responses. The items did not elicit grammatical gender because the target

words were presented without determiners. Cronbach’s alpha reliability for this task was .98.

Lecture de mots. ‘French Word Reading’. The word-reading subtest of the Wechsler

Individual Achievement Test II (Wechsler, 2005) was used to assess the following literacy skills

in French: pre-reading skills (e.g., Dis-moi le noms de ces lettres ‘Tell me the name of these

letters’), decoding skills (Quelle lettre fait le son /a/ comme dans avion? ‘What letter makes the

/a/ sound as in ‘avion’?), and reading words from a list. The word card contained 84 words,

which varied in terms of frequency of occurrence, grapheme-phoneme regularity and the number

of syllables. The children were asked to read each word aloud, one by one, to the best of their

ability. This test was standardized on Canadian children who were native speakers of French.

Cronbach’s alpha reliability for this task was .98.

Demographic Measure

Parental demographic questionnaire. The parents completed a demographic

questionnaire designed by the researcher. Parents indicated the languages that the child spoke in

the home and the approximate percentage of time each language was spoken on a 5-point Likert

scale (never (0%), rarely (0-24%), sometimes (25-49%), frequently (50-74%), always (75-

100%)). Parents also specified whether they spoke English, French, or another language to the

child and how often they spoke the language(s) (most often, occasionally, and least often). Data

on parental education was obtained by asking the parents to indicate the highest level of

38

education attained on a 6-point scale (some high school (1), completed high school, some

college/university, completed college/university, professional degree/certificate, and post-

graduate degree (6)).

Procedure

Each child was presented with the two tasks. However, in contrast to Seigneuric et al.’s

(2007) approach, all of the participants were given the picture task first, which prevented

disclosing the purpose of the measure (i.e., no determiners were shown first). In each task, three

practice items (one for each noun subclass) were used to ensure that participants understood the

procedure. However, no feedback was provided on any of the practice and test items, to avoid

priming the children for grammatical gender. Testing for all students took place at the child’s

school during regular classroom hours in the fall term (i.e., November – December 2014) and

took approximately 45-60 minutes (over 1-2 sessions). Children were withdrawn individually

from their classes by carefully trained research assistants and taken to a familiar room in the

school to be tested. All of the measures were administered in French. However, instructions were

given in English to ensure that the children understood the purpose of the task.

Results

For each child, proportions of correctly marked masculine and feminine pseudowords

were calculated per grade by dividing the number of correctly marked pseudowords in each

category by the total number of noun endings in that category (i.e., masculine proportion = total

correct / 6, feminine proportion = total correct / 6). Next, I calculated the proportion of unmarked

pseudowords that were assigned to the masculine or feminine by dividing the number of neutral

endings in each category by the total number of pseudowords in that category (in this case, a

total score of 8, per task). Means and standard deviations of ending-consistent responses

39

according to grade, task (determiner or picture), and type of ending bias (masculine or feminine)

are shown in Table 3. The median and range of gender-neutral responses according to grade and

task are given in Table 4.

There was one univariate outlier (picture task) in the sample based on standard scores

with a value greater than 2.2 standard deviation units away from the mean (Hoaglin & Iglewicz,

1987). This case was excluded from all analyses. The data were examined for normality by

inspecting skewness and kurtosis values for each variable following the guidelines proposed in

Kirby et al. (2012) (i.e. statistic/SE < ± 3.09). Both of the experimental measures were normally

distributed. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found a significant

difference between grades 2, 4, and 6 with respect to age F(2, 145) = 2165.94, p < .001, French

receptive vocabulary F(2, 145) = 55.08, p < .001 and French word reading F(2, 145) = 71.42, p <

.001. Post hoc comparisons using the Bonferroni assumption revealed significant differences

between all three grades, p < .001, except on French word reading (p = .551) between grade 4

and 6. As shown in Table 3, French receptive vocabulary and French word reading scores

increased across grade. Overall, French L2 children lagged behind native French speakers as

indicated by the standard scores. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) found no significant

difference between grades 2, 4, and 6 with respect to the distribution of maternal education, F(2,

141) = 2.79, p = .065. The average level of maternal education for all three grades was a

university/college degree.

40

Table 3. Descriptive Statistics of Measures

Grade 2 (n = 46) Grade 4 (n = 47) Grade 6 (n = 55) Combined (n = 148)

Variable M SD M SD M SD M SD

Agea 89.89 3.77 113.09 3.68 136.73 3.29 114.66 19.69

Maternal Educationb 4.74 .95 4.84 .99 4.37 1.17 4.63 1.06

French Receptive Vocabularyc 45.93 25.53 80.13 28.58 99.38 22.93 76.66 33.77

French Receptive Vocabulary SS 72.78 22.07 84.89 23.26 86.65 16.90 81.79 21.45

French Word Readingd 65.78 22.09 105.13 20.03 110.44 18.09 94.87 28.00

French Word Reading SS 84.71 16.56 95.39 13.31 90.28 14.31 90.17 15.25

Picture Feminine Correcte .64* .15 .71* .20 .69* .15 .68 .17

Picture Masculine Correcte .55 .21 .62* .18 .65* .20 .61 .20

Determiner Feminine Correcte .57 .24 .67* .22 .66* .23 .63 .23

Determiner Masculine Correcte .56* .19 .59* .20 .62* .20 .59 .20

Note. SS = Standard Scores. aIn months. b Mother’s highest level of education based on a 6-point scale (some high school (1),

completed high school, some college/university, completed college/university, professional degree/certificate, and post-graduate

degree (6)). Maximum score = 32. cNumber of known words. Maximum score = 170. dSum of the number of correctly identified

sounds/letters, and the number of words read correctly. Maximum score = 131. eProportion of correct trials (chance = .50).

*Performance significantly above chance.

41

Table 4. The median number of gender-neutral responses as a function of grade and task.

Task Gender-neutral

Grade 2

(n = 46)

Grade 4

(n = 47)

Grade 6

(n = 55)

endings Mdn Mdn Mdn

Determiner Masculine 4 (7) 4 (6) 3 (5)

Feminine 4 (7) 4 (6) 5 (5)

Picture Masculine 5 (6) 5 (5) 5 (6)

Feminine 3 (6) 3 (5) 3 (6)

Note. Mdn = Median. The range is provided in parentheses.

Picture Task

Typically Masculine and Feminine Endings. A mixed-design, two-factor ANOVA with

ending bias as the within-subjects effect and grade as a between-subjects effect was conducted to

evaluate the difference in the proportions of correctly marked masculine and feminine

pseudowords for children in grades 2, 4 and 6. The ANOVA yielded a significant main effect for

age, F(1, 144) = 3.28, p = .041, 𝜂𝑝2 = .04, suggesting gender-marking ability increased across

the three groups for both masculine and feminine words. Post hoc comparisons using the

Bonferroni adjustment revealed no significant differences in scores between grade 2 and grade 6,

p = .057, 95% CI [-.14, .001], grade 2 and grade 4, p = .124, 95% CI [-.14, .01] and grade 4 and

grade 6, p = 1.00, 95% CI [-.08, .07] in the proportion of correctly marked masculine and

feminine pseudowords. There was also a significant main effect for ending bias, F(1, 144) =

18.18, p < .001, 𝜂𝑝2 = .11. As shown in Figure 1, French L2 learners made more consistent

responses with gender-biased pseudowords that referred to female entities than to male entities in

each grade. The interaction between ending bias and grade was not significant, F(1, 144) = .62, p

= .541, 𝜂𝑝2 = .01. In addition, t tests performed on these values revealed that performance was

42

greater than chance for the feminine pseudowords (p < .001 at grade 2, 4 and 6) and for

masculine pseudowords (p < .001 at grade 4 and 6, but not significant for grade 2, p = .087).5

Figure 1. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses in the picture task for biased

pseudowords as a function of grade.

5 The homogeneity of variance assuption as assessed by Levene's Test was not satisfied (p < .05) for

feminine words in the picture task. Because the variance assumption was violated for one of the variables,

a Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test showed that children performed significantly better on feminine words as

opposed to masculine words in grade 2 (Z = -2.35, p = .019), grade 4 (Z = -2.39, p = .017), and grade 6 (Z

= -2.16, p = .031). A Kruskal-Wallis test evaluated the differences among the three grades on the median

change in number of correctly marked pseudowords. The test, which was corrected for tied ranks, was not

significant for either masculine, 𝝌2 (2, n = 147) = 5.14, p = .077 or feminine pseudowords 𝝌2 (2, n = 147)

= 4.67, p = .097.

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

Grade 2 Grade 4 Grade 6

Pro

po

rtio

n o

f en

din

g-c

on

sist

ent

resp

on

ses

Grade

Masculine

Feminine

43

Neutral Endings. In each grade, a one-sample Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test investigated

whether the number of gender-neutral pseudowords that were assigned to the masculine or

feminine differed from a hypothetical median of 4.5 (i.e., there were 8 gender ambiguous

pseudowords, thus, a value of 4.5 would indicate no default in terms of assignment). The median

and range of gender-neutral words according to grade and task are shown in Table 4. The results

indicated that the children assigned significantly more gender-neutral endings to the masculine

subclass than the feminine in grade 2, W = 126.00 p < .001, in grade 4, W = 81.50 p < .001, and

in grade 6, W = 201.00 p < .001. As shown in Figures 2-4, the observed median (Mdn = 3) was

significantly different than the hypothesized median (Mdn = 4.5) in each grade, p < .001. In each

figure, the observed median (represented by the solid line) falls to the left of the hypothesized

median (represented by the dotted line). In grade 2 and 4, the majority of children assigned three

gender-unmarked nouns to the feminine subclass, which implied that the remaining pseudowords

(i.e., five) were assigned to the masculine subclass. In grade 6, the participants assigned six

gender-neutral nouns to the masculine subclass. Taken together, the results suggest that the

masculine gender class was more likely to be overused than the feminine in cases where gender-

endings were neutral (e.g., spadique*).

44

Figure 2. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 2.

Figure 3. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 4.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fre

qu

ency

Number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

1 2 3 4 5 6

Fre

qu

ency

Number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass

45

Figure 4. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 6.

Determiner Task

Typically Masculine and Feminine Endings. A mixed-design, two-factor ANOVA with

ending bias as the within-subjects effect and grade as a between-subjects effect was conducted to

evaluate the difference in the proportions of correctly marked masculine and feminine

pseudowords for children in grades 2, 4 and 6. The ANOVA yielded a significant main effect for

age, F(1, 145) = 3.49, p = .033, 𝜂𝑝2 = .05. As shown in Figure 5, gender-marking ability

increased across the three groups for both masculine and feminine words. Post hoc comparisons

using the Bonferroni adjustment revealed a significant difference between grade 2 and grade 6, p

= .045, 95% CI [-.15, -.001] but, no significant differences between grade 2 and grade 4, p =

.108, 95% CI [-.15, .01] and grade 4 and grade 6, p = 1.00, 95% CI [-.08, .07] in the proportion

of correctly marked masculine and feminine pseudowords. The main effect of ending bias was

not significant, F(1, 145) = 3.21, p = .075, 𝜂𝑝2 = .02 meaning that there was no difference

between the proportion of ending-consistent responses given to masculine and feminine endings.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

18

20

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fre

qu

ency

Number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass

46

The interaction between ending bias and grade was also not significant, F(1, 145) = .70, p = .498,

𝜂𝑝2 = .01. In addition, t tests performed on these values revealed that performance was greater

than chance for the feminine pseudowords (p < .001 at grade 4 and 6, but not significant for

grade 2, p= .071) and for masculine pseudowords (p = .048 at grade 2, p = .003 at grade 4, and p

< .001 at grade 6).

Figure 5. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses in the determiner task for biased

pseudowords a function of grade.

Neutral Endings. In each grade, a one-sample Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test investigated

whether the number of gender-neutral pseudowords that were assigned to the masculine or

feminine differed from a hypothetical median of 4.5 (i.e., there were 8 gender ambiguous

pseudowords, thus, a value of 4.5 would indicate no default in terms of assignment). The median

and range of gender-neutral words according to grade and task are shown in Table 4. The results

indicated that the children did not default to one subclass over the other in grade 2, W = 466.50 p

= .410, in grade 4, W = 503.50 p = .511, and in grade 6, W = 782.00 p = .918. As shown in

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

Grade 2 Grade 4 Grade 6

Pro

po

rtio

n o

f en

din

g-c

on

sist

ent

resp

on

ses

Grade

Masculine

Feminine

47

Figure 6 -8, the distance between the observed (Mdn = 4 in grade 2 and 4, Mdn = 5 in grade 6)

and the hypothesized median (Mdn = 4.5) is relatively close to the midpoint, indicating that there

was no default subclass. In grade 2 and 4, children were equally likely to assign gender-

unmarked nouns to the masculine as well as the feminine subclass. In grade 6, the observed

median fell to the right of the hypothesized median as children assigned slightly more gender-

neutral nouns to the feminine, as opposed to the masculine subclass. Taken together, the results

suggest that neither subclass appeared to act as the default value in cases where gender-endings

were ambiguous (e.g., flaumide*).

Figure 6. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 2.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fre

qu

ency

Number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass

48

Figure 7. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 4.

Figure 8. The number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass in grade 6.

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Fre

qu

ency

Number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

2 3 4 5 6 7

Fre

qu

ency

Number of gender-unmarked nouns assigned to the feminine subclass

49

Discussion

Study 1 investigated grammatical gender assignment ability among three groups of

bilingual children who were enrolled in an early French immersion program. In terms of the first

research objective, gender-marking ability was examined across grades 2, 4 and 6. As expected,

the results revealed that in both the picture and determiner tasks, the ability to assign gender to

typically biased pseudowords improved with grade. However, performance in both tasks lagged

behind that of native French speakers of a comparable age (e.g., Seigneuric et al., 2007). The

second aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of morphophonological cues on

gender assignment. The results indicated that more ending-consistent responses were given to

feminine endings than to masculine endings in both tasks at each time point, although this

difference only reached significance in the picture task. The third query of the present study

concerned the extent to which a particular noun subclass acted as the default gender value. The

results showed that in the picture task, children assigned gender-neutral endings to the masculine

subclass significantly more often than to the feminine subclass. This trend was not observed in

the determiner task.

Although gender assignment increased across the three grades for French L2 learners, its

development appears to be slower than that of native French speakers. Based on research

conducted with monolingual French speakers (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1979), grammatical gender

is well developed by the ages of 3 or 4. Likewise, in Seigneuric et al.’s (2007) study, there was

an increase in the effect of morphosyntactic cues on gender endings in both tasks, such that, by

age 9 monolingual French speaking children correctly identified feminine pseudowords 78% of

the time, and masculine words 87% of the time in the determiner task. In the picture task,

children correctly assigned feminine words 90% of the time and masculine words 95% of the

time. In the current study, the gender-marking ability of the L2 speakers was noticeably inferior

50

to that of native speakers as performance in grade 2 was only slightly above chance for

masculine nouns in the determiner task (56%) and feminine nouns in the picture task (64%), and

was below chance for feminine nouns in the determiner task and masculine nouns in the picture

task. However, in grade 4, L2 learners were significantly above chance in both tasks, and

performance improved relative to children in grade 2, in both the picture task (62% for masculine

nouns and 71% for feminine nouns) and the determiner task (59% for masculine nouns and 67%

for feminine nouns). In grade 6, French L2 learners correctly assigned masculine pseudowords

65% of the time and feminine pseudowords 69% of the time to their appropriate subclass in the

picture task. In the determiner task, children correctly assigned masculine words 62% of the time

and feminine words 66% of the time. In summary, like native French speakers, gender

assignment ability improved across the three groups. However, in the current research, the

bilingual children demonstrated awareness of grammatical gender much later (around age 9)

when compared to the existing literature on French L1 children (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979) and

they never achieved equivalent levels of performance.

According to the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (e.g., Hawkins & Chan,

1997), the participants in this study missed the sensitive learning period for gender acquisition

(as exposure to French began around 5 years of age) and would thus face numerous challenges

with gender attribution, especially for those children whose L1 did not share the linguistic feature

(e.g., Franceschina, 2005). That being said, from a developmental perspective, the current

findings do not support the assumptions of the FFFH. Given their above chance performance in

both tasks (except at Grade 2), the results suggest that English L1 learners6 have developed at

6 The majority of the children in the current study (95.3%) spoke English in the home.

51

least some knowledge about gender assignment in French, similar to native speakers, although

this ability was still not fully acquired. Instead, these findings can be situated within the Full

Transfer Full Access (FTFA) model (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994) as grammatical features

that are absent from the L1 can be acquired with sufficient input to the L2, regardless of the age

of acquisition. Nevertheless, some researchers have argued that despite many years of formal

education, English L1 learners of French continue to struggle with gender assignment (Andersen,

1984; Surridge, 1993). Future research should examine gender assignment ability in an older

group of L2 learners of French enrolled in an immersion program.

In terms of the second important finding in this study, the results showed that French L2

learners made more consistent responses with gender biased pseudowords that referred to

feminine words than to masculine words in both tasks at each time point, although this difference

only reached significance in the picture task. Although, grammatical gender corresponds to

natural gender in about 10% of nouns (Séguin, 1969), in the picture task, it was shown that

children correctly associated morphophonological cues carried by the noun’s ending with

semantic entities (e.g., -ette as in ploumiette* representing a female Martian). In the determiner

task, the participants correctly associated morphophonological cues carried by the noun’s ending

with the corresponding linguistic article (e.g., unMASC bilacron* ‘a bilacron*’). Similar to the

picture task, the results corroborated studies on French L1 speakers, as more consistent responses

were given to feminine endings than to masculine endings (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Seigneuric et

al., 2007), although the main effect for ending bias only approached significance. Moreover, the

results concurred with the form-focused route (Gollan and Frost, 2001), as nouns were assigned

to a gender subclass based on their ending. It appears then, that in this study, French L2 children

relied on noun endings as a cue to assigning gender to nouns, given that they did not have an

52

entry in their mental lexicon for pseudowords (consistent with French L2 adult speakers in

Holmes & Dejean de la Bâtie, 1999).

Interestingly, in Seigneuric et al.’s (2007) study, in both tasks, the effect of

morphosyntactic cues emerged earlier for feminine endings than for masculine endings among a

group of native French speakers (between the ages of 3 and 9). However, older children (5, 6, 7,

and 9 year olds in the determiner task, and 6 and 9 year olds in the picture task) made more

ending-consistent responses to masculine pseudowords. According to Karmiloff-Smith (1979),

during the initial stages of gender acquisition, younger children assume that grammatical gender

is determined by natural gender. Over time, they begin to attend to morphophonological cues

given sufficient input in the target language. Likewise, the results of the current study revealed

that more ending consistent responses were given to feminine biased pseudowords in each grade.

Since there is a delay in gender-assignment ability relative to native French speakers, future

research ought to investigate whether an increase in ending consistent responses to masculine

biased words in addition to feminine biased pseudowords holds true in an older group of French

immersion students. Before addressing gender-neutral endings, the analysis investigated whether

the default strategy was employed for typically biased pseudowords. The results indicated that in

contrast to Boloh and Ibernon’s (2010) theory, the default strategy was not observed for typically

masculine or typically feminine endings. In other words, performance on masculine endings was

not at ceiling at all ages, and scores for feminine endings were not significantly below those of

masculine endings, but were also above chance level. Hence, as expected, children relied on

noun endings as an effective cue during gender attribution.

The question that remained though was whether one subclass was more likely to be

overused than the other in cases where the gender-endings were unbiased (e.g., -ide as in

53

flaumide*). Overall, the masculine as a default appeared to be a robust strategy in the picture

task, as children attributed gender-neutral endings to male entities significantly more often than

to female ones in each grade (e.g., pointing to the picture representing a male Martian for

noplide*). The observed median was found to differ significantly from the hypothesized median,

indicating that children overused the masculine subclass compared to the feminine. It appears

that for gender-neutral pseudowords, French L2 children were unable to rely on

morphophonological cues (i.e., the form focused route) for non-words, given that unbiased

endings are equally dispersed across both genders. Conversely, this tendency was not observed in

the determiner task, as roughly half of the pseudowords were assigned to the masculine subclass,

while the other half were assigned to the feminine. One explanation for the discrepancy in the

results lies in the nature of the tasks employed for this study. For example, in the determiner task,

French L2 children might have relied on the ‘backward processing’ strategy (Tucker et al., 1997)

by processing the noun’s ending from right to left in conjunction with the linguistic article

(determiner) before assigning the gender-neutral pseudoword to a particular subclass. It appears

that semantic information (in the picture task) did not have the same effect. Overall, the results in

Study 1 showed that morphophonological rules played an important role in gender attribution for

typically biased words. However, it seems that words syntactically related to the noun such as

determiners may be used in conjunction with morphophonological cues when assigning gender

to pseudowords with gender-neutral endings.

In summary, the objective of Study 1 was to examine the impact of morphophonological

cues on gender attribution across three groups of French immersion children. Taken together, in

both tasks, more ending-consistent responses were given to feminine biased pseudowords.

Within the statistical learning framework, it may be argued that feminine regularities were more

frequent and thus, were more salient to children in the early stages of gender acquisition.

54

Conversely, an ending such as –oque, is considered to be typically neutral. Consequently,

children were more likely to default to one subclass (e.g., the masculine) in instances where they

were uncertain. As such, future studies should employ lexical and sublexical choice tasks to

examine the relationship between orthographic regularities and grammatical gender-marking

ability. Furthermore, another avenue of research should consider the relationship between

spelling patterns and gender acquisition by analyzing the results obtained from spelling tests.

55

Chapter 6: Study 2

Given the paucity of research on minority language children in French immersion, and

motivated by a gap in L3 research, the objective of Study 2 was to investigate gender-marking in

French, as a function of home language status among three groups of French immersion students:

children whose home language marks gender (e.g., Spanish), children whose home language is a

language other than English that does not mark gender (e.g., Tamil) and English-first language

children. Therefore, French was a third language for the first two groups and a L2 for the final

group. The methodology employed in the current study was the same as the one reported in

Study 1. In both tasks (i.e., picture and determiner), children whose L1 marks gender were

expected to outperform children whose L1 does not mark gender (consistent with Sabourin et al.,

2006; Schwartz et al., 2014).

Method

Participants

A subgroup from the 148 children who participated in Study 1 was identified using the

parental demographic questionnaire data. A total of 27 children (M = 120.74 months, SD =

16.14, 10 males) took part in the study. Table 5 displays the frequency distribution for each

language background. Using the parental demographic questionnaire, I first identified 9 children

(M = 121.56 months, SD = 17.26, 2 males) whose L1 marks gender, which included Polish,

Spanish (ns = 2), Arabic, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Slovak (ns = 1).7 For these

participants, French was a third language. Next, I identified 9 children (M = 119.56, SD = 17.80,

7 In total, there were 11 children whose L1 marks gender. However, two grade 2 students were

excluded from the analysis because there was no match available in the L3_NMG group.

56

3 males), who had been exposed to a L1 other than English that does not mark gender. The

languages represented in this group included: Tamil (n = 3), Mandarin (n = 2), Farsi, Filipino,

Korean and Tibetan (ns = 1). For these participants, French was a third language as it was for the

first group. Finally, the third group was comprised of 9 English-first language children (M =

121.11, SD = 15.13, 5 males) for whom French was a second language. From hereon in, the

group whose L1 marks gender, the group whose L1 other than English that does not mark

gender, and English-first language children are labeled as L3_MG group, the L3_NMG group

and the L2_NMG group respectively. As the pool of English L1 participants was very large, I

matched the L2_NMG group with the L3_MG and the L3_NMG groups on French receptive

vocabulary, French word reading, place of birth, grade and, when possible, for gender. There

were 2 students in grade 2, 4 students in grade 4 and 4 students in grade 6 in each language

group. Due to the small sample size, the data from the three grades were collapsed for all

statistical analyses.

As described in Study 1, the parents completed a demographic questionnaire about language,

demographic and educational information. Within the group of 27 children, 18 learned to speak a

language other than English as their first language (i.e., the L3_MG and L3_NMG groups). Of

the 27 children, 22.2% of the children in the L3_MG group and 55.6% of the L3_NMG group

spoke English more than 75% of the time. Approximately, 44.4% of the children in the L3_MG

group and 33.3% of the children in the L3_NMG group reported speaking their L1 more than

50% of the time. Furthermore, 87.5% of children in the L3_MG group, 44.4% of children in the

L3_NMG group and 66.7% of children in the L2_NMG group had more than 50 books at home.8

Moreover, 29% of parents in the L3_MG group, 25% in the L3_NMG group and 33.3% of

8 One participant from the L3_MG group did not respond to this question.

57

parents in the L2_NMG group reported that they read with their child almost everyday.9

Approximately, 55.6% of the children in the L3_MG group, 33.3% of the children in the

L3_NMG group and 77.8% of children in the L2_NMG group engaged in daily independent

reading.10 The frequency distribution of maternal education is reported in Table 6. In this sample,

100% of the mothers in the L3_MG group, 75% of the mother in the L3_NMG group and 66.7%

of the mothers in the L2_NMG group completed at least a college/university degree.11 Finally,

88.9% of the children in the L3_MG group, 87.5% of the children in the L3_NMG group and

100% of the children in the L2_NMG group were born in Canada. For those who were born

outside of Canada, the average age of immigration was 24 months.12

9 Two participants from the L3_MG group and 1 participant from the L3_NMG group did not

respond to this question.

10 Two participants from the L3_MG group and two participants from the L3_NMG group did

not respond to this question.

11 One participant from the L3_MG group and one participant from the L3_NMG group did not

respond to this question.

12 One participant from the L3_NMG group did not respond to this question.

58

Table 5. Frequency Distribution of Language Background

Language Frequency Percent (%)

Child's most often spoken language in the home

English 21 77.8

Other 6 22.2

Total 27 100

Child's first language he/she learned to speak at home

Arabic 1 3.7

English 9 33.3

Farsi 1 3.7

Filipino 1 3.7

Greek 1 3.7

Korean 1 3.7

Mandarin 2 7.4

Polish 2 7.4

Portuguese 1 3.7

Russian 1 3.7

Slovak 1 3.7

Spanish 2 7.4

Tamil 3 11.1

Tibetan 1 3.7

Total 27 100

Table 6. Frequency Distribution of Maternal Education

Level of Education Frequency Percent (%)

Some High School

1

3.7

Completed High School

1

3.7

Some College/University

2

7.4

Completed College/University

11

40.7

Professional Degree/Certificate

4

14.8

Post-Graduate Degree (Master's, Doctorate, Law, Medicine)

6

22.2

Missing

2

7.4

Total 27 100

Measures

The test battery was made up of standardized and experimental measures. In the present

study, children were assessed on the picture task and the determiner task described in Study 1. In

addition, parents completed the same demographic questionnaire as in the first study. Two

control measures (i.e., French receptive vocabulary and French word reading described in Study

59

1) and four demographic variables (i.e., maternal education, grade, gender, place of birth) were

used as matching variables.

Procedure

The methodology employed in the current study was the same as the one reported in

Study 1.

Results

For each child, proportions of correctly marked masculine and feminine pseudowords were

calculated per language by dividing the number of correctly marked pseudowords in each

category by the total number of noun endings in that category (i.e., masculine proportion = total

correct / 6, feminine proportion = total correct / 6). Means and standard deviations of ending-

consistent responses according to language, task (determiner or picture), and type of ending bias

(masculine or feminine) are given in Table 7.

There were no univariate outliers in the sample based on standard scores with a value

greater than 2.2 standard deviation units away from the mean (Hoaglin & Iglewicz, 1987). The

data was examined for normality by inspecting skewness and kurtosis values for each variable

following the guidelines proposed in Kirby et al., (2012) (i.e. statistic/SE < ± 3.09). The data fell

within the acceptable range for all experimental measures. A one-way multivariate analysis of

variance (MANOVA) examined whether age, French receptive vocabulary, and French word

reading differed across a categorical variable, language group (i.e., L3_MG, L3_NMG, and

L2_NMG). As indicated in Table 7, the L2_NMG group scored the highest in French receptive

vocabulary and French word reading when compared to the L3_MG and the L3_NMG groups.

However, the MANOVA revealed that there were no significant differences among the three

groups with respect to age F(2, 24) = .04, p = .965, French receptive vocabulary F(2, 24) = .20, p

60

= .818, and French word reading F(2, 24) = .04, p = .961. A one-way analysis of variance

(ANOVA) found no significant difference between the three groups (i.e., L3_MG, L3_NMG,

and L2_NMG) with respect to the distribution of maternal education, F(2, 22) = 3.22, p = .059.

61

Table 7. Descriptive Statistics of Measures

Variable L3_MG (n = 9) L3_NMG (n = 9) L2_NMG (n = 9) Combined (n = 27)

M SD M SD M SD M SD

Agea 121.56 17.26 119.56 17.80 121.11 15.13 120.74 16.14

Maternal Educationb 5.13 .99 3.63 1.60 4.33 .87 4.36 1.29

French Receptive Vocabularyc 76.78 46.23 80.89 24.67 87.56 34.63 81.74 35.13

French Receptive Vocabulary SS 83.63 24.72 80.78 20.14 85.11 22.71 83.15 21.66

French Word Readingd 101.89 40.68 98.33 39.17 102.56 18.62 100.93 33.04

French Word Reading SS 98.88 14.94 98.25 15.35 88.44 11.52 94.92 14.24

Picture Feminine Correcte .78* .08 .63* .11 .63 .25 .68 .17

Picture Masculine Correcte .76* .21 .65* .10 .61 .24 .67 .19

Determiner Feminine Correcte .80* .22 .69* .26 .50 .26 .66 .27

Determiner Masculine Correcte .70* .18 .54 .22 .57 .15 .60 .19

Note. SS = Standard Scores. aIn months. b Mother’s highest level of education based on a 6-point scale (some high school (1),

completed high school, some college/university, completed college/university, professional degree/certificate, and post-graduate

degree (6)). Maximum score = 32. cNumber of known words. Maximum score = 170. dSum of the number of correctly identified

sounds and letters, and number of words read correctly. Maximum score = 131. eProportion of correct trials (chance = .50).

*Performance significantly above chance.

62

Picture Task

Typically Masculine and Feminine Endings. An a priori contrast analysis, found a

significant difference in favour of the L3_MG group when compared with the L2_NMG group in

the proportions of correctly marked masculine and feminine pseudowords that were assigned to

female and male entities, p = .042, 95% CI [-.29, -.01]. However, no significant difference was

found between the L3_NMG group and the L3_MG group, p = .072, 95% CI [-.27, .01]. In

addition, t tests performed on these values revealed that performance was greater than chance for

the feminine pseudowords (p < .001 for L3_MG, p = .008 for L3_NMG, but not significant for

L2_NMG p = .154) and for masculine pseudowords (p = .005 for L3_MG, p = .002 for

L3_NMG, but not significant for L2_NMG group p = .195). As shown in Figure 9, the L3_MG

group made significantly more ending-consistent responses for both masculine and feminine

nouns when compared to the L2_NMG group.

Figure 9. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses (with standard error bars) in the

picture task for biased pseudowords as a function of language.

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

L3_MG L3_NMG L2_NMG

Pro

port

ion

of

end

ing

-con

sist

ent

resp

on

ses

Language

Masculine

Feminine

**: p = .042**

**

63

Determiner Task

Typically Masculine and Feminine Endings. An a priori contrast analysis found a

significant difference in favour of the L3_MG group when compared with the L2_NMG group in

the proportions of correctly marked masculine and feminine pseudowords, p = .005, 95% CI [-

.36, -.07]. There was a trend toward a significant difference between the L3_NMG group and the

L3_MG group, p = .056, 95% CI [-.28, .004]. In addition, t tests performed on these values

revealed that performance was greater than chance for the feminine pseudowords (p = .003 for

L3_MG, p = .062 for L3_NMG, but not significant for L2_NMG p = 1.00) and for masculine

pseudowords (p = .010 for L3_MG, but not significant for L3_NMG p = .622, and L2_NMG

group p = .169). As shown in Figure 10, the L3_MG group made significantly more ending-

consistent responses for both masculine and feminine nouns when compared to the L2_NMG

group.

Figure 10. The proportion of masculine and feminine responses (with standard errors bars) in the

determiner task for biased pseudowords as a function of language.

64

Discussion

Due to the relative dearth of studies, the process by which French L3 children learn to

mark gender remains unclear. To fill the gap of previous research, the objective of Study 2 was

to examine gender-marking in French, as a function of home language status among three groups

of French immersion students: children whose home language marks gender (L3_MG), children

whose home language is a language other than English that does not mark gender (L3_NMG)

and English-first language children (L2_NMG). Building on the foundational research in cross-

language transfer, Lado’s Contrastive Analysis hypothesis (1957) stated that it is possible to

determine which elements of the target language will be difficult for learners from a given L1

background based on structural similarities and differences between the L1 and the additional

language. Based on this theory, positive transfer was expected for the L3_MG group learning

French as the presence of the gender system in both the home language and the language of

instruction was predicted to facilitate category acquisition. On the other hand, negative transfer

was anticipated for the L3_NMG and the L2_NMG groups, based on the absence of gender in

the L1.

To verify these predictions, a priori contrast analyses were conducted for both tasks in

which I found a significant difference in favour of the L3_MG group when compared to the

L2_NMG group in the proportion of correctly marked pseudowords; none of the remaining

comparisons were significant although there was a trend toward a significant difference between

the L3_NMG and the L3_MG groups. In other words, the results from the current study suggest

that there is some evidence that gender-marking ability acquired in the L1 (e.g., Spanish or

Russian) supports the acquisition of gender in a third language (e.g., French), as indicated by the

superior performance of the L3_MG group. Therefore, it appears that structural features that are

absent from the L1 may not be readily learned in a second language as performance for the

65

English-first language group was below chance in both tasks. Interestingly, in this study, the

L3_NMG group almost always assigned pseudowords at a level above chance. Thus, it seems

that gender can be acquired to some extent for French L3 children whose L1 does not mark

gender but, its development appears to be slower than that of French L3 learners whose L1 marks

gender. Ultimately, to the best of my knowledge, this study is the first to support cross-transfer of

gender-marking ability between the L1 and the L3, consistent with Lado’s Contrastive Analysis

Hypothesis (1957).

One possible explanation for the L3_MG group’s greater performance in the determiner

task lies in the “chunking” strategy, which is the product of exposure to the oral form of the word

and its determiner. According to Carroll (1989), native French-speaking children learn new

words as one unit (e.g., labicyclette, ‘the bicycle’), whereas, English L1 children learning French

process nouns and their modifiers as separate lexical items (e.g., laFEM bicyclette). According to

Carroll (1989), “endings do not exist.” (p. 563) However, the results in the current study suggest

that morphophonological cues are important. By analogy, the L3_MG group may have used the

“chunking strategy” in the determiner task by associating the correct article after having

processed the pseudoword’s morphophonological ending from right to left (i.e., relied on the

“backward processing strategy” Tucker et al., 1977) (e.g., unesinourette*, ‘a sinourette*’).

Furthermore, the L3_MG group may have relied more heavily on morphophonological cues

(given the presence of gender marking in their L1) when compared to the L3_NMG and the

L2_MG groups.

Applying Kuo and Anderson’s structural sensitivity theory (2010) to language

acquisition, it appears that the L3_MG group’s heightened awareness to language across diverse

contexts made them more sensitive to gender marking, and they were able to learn more quickly

66

which endings were more likely to be masculine or feminine, facilitated by the presence of

gender in the L1. More recently, Kahn-Horwitz, Kuash, Ibrahim and Schwartz (2014), found that

compared to bilingual children (e.g., Hebrew L1, English L2 learners), “multilingual children can

draw on a larger and more varied linguistic and cognitive repertoire of resources” that exist in

their first or additional language when they acquire specific elements in a new language (Geva,

2014, p. 10). In other words, studies, including the current one, suggest that the L3_NMG group

may have had a slight advantage in gender-marking because they had access to two linguistic

systems (i.e., more language experience) that shared the same linguistic feature (i.e., gender-

marking) when acquiring a third language as opposed to their English monolingual counterparts

(Cenoz, 2003). Future research on L3 acquisition is necessary to support these results.

67

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Limitations and Future Research

When evaluating the results, a few limitations of the current study have to be taken into

account. First, longitudinal follow-up is necessary to examine the development of gender

performance and whether the gap between students whose first language marks gender and

students whose L1 does not mark gender changes over time. Second, our sample size (especially

in Study 2) was small which limits the generalizability of the results. Third, a monolingual

French comparison group would have provided a clearer picture of the nature of the relationship

between gender assignment in native speakers compared to French L2 learners. Finally, the

linguistic backgrounds of the participants in Study 2 were scattered among a variety of languages

(ns = 1-3 children per language), which prevented the researcher from examining the results in

terms of their typological profiles. Future research will follow up on this study by investigating

gender-marking abilities across more homogenous groups of children in French immersion:

Romance language speakers (e.g., Italian), students whose home language is a non-Romance

language but marks gender (e.g., Hebrew) and students whose home language does not mark

gender and is not English (e.g., Chinese). These studies may show that second language

acquisition of grammatical gender is affected more by the structural similarity of gender marking

between the first language and an additional language than by the mere presence of gender

features in the L1.

According to Lyster (2006), final phonemes are not the most reliable predictors of

phonological endings when compared to orthographic representations. For example, in French,

/ε/ is a feminine ending when spelled -aie but, a masculine ending when spelled -ais. Hence, a

potential avenue for future research includes investigating the relationship between

68

morphophonological cues and orthographic regularities in French using both spoken and written

measures of gender assignment. Furthermore, it would be interesting to explore gender-marking

acquisition across different types of French programs (e.g., core French vs. French immersion).

Likewise, it would be fascinating to examine gender development in multi-language (French-

Spanish-German-Mandarin) immersion programs, an innovative program that is under

negotiation in the city from which this thesis sample was drawn.

Educational and Theoretical Implications

Typically, French immersion students recognize that they can use many anglicisms and

commit grammatical errors in their speech and writing and still be understood by their peers

(Lyster, 1987 as cited in Warden, 1997). In fact, teachers may be unwilling to interrupt the flow

of the conversation in order to correct for gender mistakes, as error correction is not often

emphasized (Harley, 1993). Furthermore, although there is a large supply of French grammatical

textbooks, typically attention to gender is sparse. From a more practical point of view, teachers

can teach students effective strategies to solve the problem of gender assignment by making

them more aware of the orthographic patterns at the ends of nouns that serve as cues for

predicting grammatical gender. The mastery of grammatical gender can improve the fluency of

communication in everyday language use. Ultimately, analytic strategies such as drawing

children’s attention to word ending regularities may be necessary to complement the experiential

learning in French immersion programs (Harley, 1993).

From a more theoretical point of view, although the French gender attribution system is

opaque and arbitrary (Corbett, 1991), morphophonological rules based on a noun’s ending serve

as a useful strategy in noun subclass assignment (Lyster, 2006). According to the FFFH

(Hawkins & Chan, 1997) the children in the aforementioned study missed the sensitive learning

69

period for gender acquisition and were expected to face difficulties with gender attribution. That

being said, from a developmental perspective, the findings from Study 1 do not support the

assumptions of the FFFH. The results provided evidence that correct gender assignment

improved across grade. Thus, in accordance with the FTFA (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse, 1994),

with sufficient input in the French language, the learning trajectory for gender marking is

comparable between L1 and L2 speakers in French. Furthermore, in Study 2, there was some

evidence that gender-marking ability acquired in the L1 supports the acquisition of gender in a

third language. Given their diversity of linguistic experience, multilingual children should not be

considered as a uniform group. For children whose L1 marks gender, French immersion teachers

may be able to draw on the similarities and differences in gender-marking patterns between the

L1 and French. Consequently, children whose first language does not mark gender may require

additional support. Taken together, explicit form-focused gender-marking instruction (based on

word ending regularities) is essential for attaining native-like mastery in gender assignment.

70

References

Allen, M. (2004). Reading achievement of students in French immersion programs. Educational

Quarterly Review, 9(4), 25-30.

Andersen, R. (1984). What’s gender good for, anyway? In R. Andersen (ed.), Second languages:

A cross-linguistic perspective, pp. 77–99. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Andriamamonjy, P. (2000). Le rôle du genre grammatical au cours de la reconnaissance de

noms. L’Année Psychologique, 100(3), 419–442.

Au‐Yeung, K., Hipfner‐Boucher, K., Chen, X., Pasquarella, A., D'Angelo, N., & Hélène Deacon,

S. (2015). Development of English and French Language and Literacy Skills in EL1 and

EL French Immersion Students in the Early Grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(2),

233-254.

Bartning, I. (2000). Gender agreement in L2 French: Pre‐advanced vs advanced learners. Studia

linguistica, 54(2), 225-237.

Bérubé, D., & Marinova-Todd, S. H. (2012). The development of language and reading skills in

the second and third languages of multilingual children in French

Immersion. International Journal of Multilingualism, 9(3), 272-293.

Boloh, Y., & Ibernon, L. (2010). Gender attribution and gender agreement in 4- to 10-year-old

French children. Cognitive Development, 25(1), 1–25.

Boloh, Y., & Ibernon, L. (2013). Natural gender, phonological cues and the default grammatical

gender in French children. First Language, 33(5), 449–468.

Bruhn de Garavito, J.,&White, L. (2002). The second language acquisition of Spanish DPs: The

71

status of grammatical features. In A. T. Pérez-Leroux & J. M. Liceras (eds.), The

acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax: The L1/L2 connection, pp. 153–178. Dordrecht:

Kluwer.

Canadian Parents for French. (2011). Retrieved from

http://cpf.ca/en/files/Prov-Enrol-Stats-2010-20113.pdf.

Carroll, S. (1989). Second-language acquisition and the computational paradigm*. Language

Learning, 39 (4), 535–94.

Cenoz, J. (2003). The additive effect of bilingualism on third language acquisition: A review.

The International Journal of Bilingualism, 7, 71-87.

Clark, E. V. (1985). The acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French. In D. Slobin

(Ed.) The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition: Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Comrie, B. (1999). Grammatical gender systems: A linguist’s assessment. Journal of

Psycholinguistic Research, 28(5), 457–466.

Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge.

Corbett, G. G. (2006). Gender, Grammatical. The Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics.

2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier, 749-756.

Cummins, J. (1981). The role of primary language development in promoting educational

success for language minority students. In California State Department of Education

(Ed.), Schooling and language minority students: A theoretical framework (pp. 3-49). Los

Angeles, CA: National Dissemination and Assessment Center.

Cuza, A., & Pérez-Tattam, R. (2014). Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in

child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach. Bilingualism: Language and

Cognition, 1–19.

Desrochers, A., & Paivio, A. (1990). Le phonème initial des noms inanimés et son effet sur

72

l'identification du genre grammatical. Canadian Journal of Psychology/Revue canadienne

de psychologie, 44(1), 44.

Dewaele, J. M., & Véronique, D. (2001). Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced

French interlanguage: A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and

Cognition, 4(03), 275-297.

Dunn, L. M., Thériault-Whalen, C. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1993). Échelle de vocabulaire

en images Peabody. Toronto: Psycan.

Fleischman, H. L., Hopstock, P. J., Stephenson, T. G., Pendzick, M. L., & Sapru, S.

(2003). Descriptive study of services to LEP students and LEP students with

disabilities (Vol. 4). US Department of Education, Office of English Language

Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited English

Proficient Students.

Franceschina, F. (2005). Fossilised second language grammars: the acquisition of grammatical

gender. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Geva, E. (2014). The Cross-Language Transfer Journey – A Guide to the Perplexed. Introduction

to the special issue: Crosslinguistic Transfer in Reading in Multilingual Contexts –

Recent Research Trends, Written Language & Literacy 17 (1), 1–15.

Gollan, T. H., & Frost, R. (2001). Two routes to grammatical gender: Evidence from

Hebrew. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 30(6), 627-651.

Grevisse, M. (1980). Le bon usage. (11 e édit). Bruxelles: Duculot.

Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or

a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28(2), 191–215.

Guillelmon, D., & Grosjean, F. (2001). The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition:

The case of bilinguals. Memory & cognition, (29) (3), 503-511.

73

Harley, B. (1993). Instructional Strategies and SLA in Early French Immersion. Studies in

Second Language Acquisition, 15(02), 245–259.

Harris, J. (1991). The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 27–62.

Hawkins, R., & Chan, C. (1997). The partial availability of Universal Grammar in second

language acquisition: The 'failed functional features hypothesis.' Second Language

Research, 13(3), 187–226.

Hawkins, R., & Franceschina, F. (2004). Explaining the acquisition and non-acquisition of

determiner-noun gender concord in French and Spanish. Language Acquisition and

Language Disorders, 32, 175-206.

Hoaglin, D., & Iglewicz, B. (1987). Fine-Tuning Some Resistant Rules for Outlier Labeling,

Journal of the American Statistical Association, 82, 1147-1149.

Hockett, C. F. (1958). A course in modern linguistics. Language Learning, 8(3‐4), 73-75.

Hohlfeld, A. (2006). Accessing grammatical gender in German: The impact of gender-marking

regularities. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(2), 127-142.

Holmes, V. M., & Dejean de la Bâtie, B. (1999). Assignment of grammatical gender by native

speakers and foreign learners of French. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20(4), 479–506.

Holmes, V. M., & Segui, J. (2004). Sublexical and lexical influences on gender assignment in

French. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 33(6), 425–457.

l’Huillier, M. (1999). Advanced French Grammar. Cambridge University Press.

Hulk, A., &Tellier, C. (1999). Conflictual agreement inRomancenominals. In J.M.Authier, B.

Bullock, & L. Reed (Eds.), Formal perspectives on Romance linguistics (pp. 179–195).

Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Jedwab, J. (2003). It pays to be bilingual in Canada: Though not everywhere. Retrieved from

74

Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages website: http://www.ocol-

clo.gc.ca/sites/default/files/Pays_to_be_Bilingual.pdf

Jescheniak, J. D., & Levelt, W. J. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval

of syntactic information and of phonological form. Journal of Experimental Psychology:

Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(4), 824.

Kahn-Horwitz, J., Kuash, S., Ibrahim, R., & Schwartz, M. (2014). How do previously acquired

languages affect acquisition of English as a foreign language: The case of

Circassian. Written Language & Literacy, 17(1), 40-61.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language: A study of determiners

and reference. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kirby, J. R., Deacon, S. H., Bowers, P. N., Izenberg, L., Wade-Woolley, L., & Parrila, R. (2012).

Children’s morphological awareness and reading ability. Reading and Writing, 25(2),

389-410.

Kuo, L. J., & Anderson, R. C. (2010). Beyond cross-language transfer: Reconceptualizing the

impact of early bilingualism on phonological awareness. Scientific Studies of

Reading, 14(4), 365-385.

Laaha, S., & Gillis, S. (Eds.). (2007). Typological perspectives on the acquisition of noun and

verb morphology. Universiteit Antwerpen.

Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics Across Cultures. Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Levelt, W. J., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech

production. Behavioral and brain sciences, 22(1), 1-38.

Larrañaga, P., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2013). The acquisition of copula verbs in Basque by

bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17(3), 284-308.

75

Liceras, J. (2010). Second language acquisition and syntactic theory in the 21st century. Annual

Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 248–269.

Lyster, R., (1987). Speaking immerion. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 43, (4), 701-

717.

Lyster, R. (2006). Predictability in French gender attribution: A corpus analysis. Journal of

French Language Studies, 16(1), 69–92.

Lyster, R. (2008). Learning French as a second language through immersion. In D. Ayoun (Ed.),

Studies in French applied linguistics (pp. 3-36). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.

Mastropavlou, M., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2011). The role of suffixes in grammatical gender

assignment in Modern Greek: A psycholinguistic study. Journal of Greek

Linguistics, 11(1), 27-55.

Meisel, J. (1983). Transfer as a second language strategy. Language and Communication,3, 11–

46.

Meisel, J. (2001). The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: Early differentiation and

subsequent development of grammars. In J. Cenoz & F. Genesee (Eds.), Trends in

bilingual acquisition (pp.11 – 42). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Melançon, A., & Shi, R. (2015). Representations of abstract grammatical feature agreement in

young children. Journal of child language, 1-15.

Mitchell, R., Myles, F., & Marsden, E. (2013). Second language learning theories. Routledge.

Montrul, S., & Potowski, K. (2007). Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish

English Bilingual Children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(3), 301–328.

New B., Pallier C., Ferrand L., Matos R. (2001) Une base de données lexicales du français

76

contemporain sur internet: LEXIQUE, L'Année Psychologique, 101, 447-462.

http://www.lexique.org

Nichols, J. (1992). Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nicoladis, E. (2006). Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual

children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9(1), 15-32.

Odlin, T. (2003) Cross-linguistic influence. In C. Doughty & M. Long (Eds.), Handbook of

Second Language Acquisition (pp. 436-486). Oxford: Blackwell.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2008). Supporting English language learners: A practical guide

for Ontario educators, Grades 1 to 8. Toronto, ON: Queen’s Printer for Ontario.

Presson, N., MacWhinney, B., & Tokowicz, N. (2014). Learning grammatical gender : The use

of rules by novice learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35(4), 709–737.

Price, G. (2008). A comprehensive French grammar. Malden MA: Blackwell.

Quemada, B. (1971). An Inverse Dictionary of All Nouns Listed in the Petit Larousse

[microfilm]. Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak.

Rebuffot, J. (1993). Le point sur l’immersion au Canada. Montréal: Éditions CEC.

Riente, L. (2003). Ladies first: The pivotal role of gender in the Italian nominal inflection

system. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics, 17(2), 1–53.

Roca, I. M. (1989). The organisation of grammatical gender. Transactions of the Philological

Society, 87, 1–32.

Roelofs, A. (1992). A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition, 42,

(1), 107-142.

Sabourin, L., Stowe, L. A., & de Haan, G. J. (2006). Transfer effects in learning a second

language grammatical gender system. Second Language Research, 22(1), 1-29.

Schriefers, H., & Jescheniak, J. D. (1999). Representation and processing of grammatical gender

77

in language production: A review. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 28(6), 575-600.

Schwartz, M., Minkov, M., Dieser, E., Protassova, E., Moin, V., & Polinsky, M. (2014).

Acquisition of Russian gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual children.

International Journal of Bilingualism, 1–27.

Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. (1994). Word order and nominative case in nonnative language

acquisition: a longitudinal study of (L1 Turkish) German interlanguage. Language

acquisition studies in generative grammar, 31(4), 71-89.

Séguin, H. (1969). Les marques du genre dans le lexique français écrit contemporain:

Compilation des cas et essai de classement. (Unpublished doctoral disseratation).

University de Montréal. Montréal.

Seigneuric, A., Zagar, D., Meunier, F., & Spinelli, E. (2007). The relation between language and

cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: The acquisition of grammatical gender in French. Journal

of Experimental Child Psychology, 96(3), 229–246.

Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in

Language Teaching, 10(1-4), 209-232.

Sera, M. D., Elieff, C., Forbes, J., Burch, M. C., Rodríguez, W., & Dubois, D. P. (2002). When

language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and

classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131(3), 377–397.

Serratrice, L. (2013). Acquisition of features in the nominal domain in bilingual acquisition.

International Journal of Bilingualism, 17(5), 657–664.

Sinay, E. (2010). Programs of choice in the TDSB: Characteristics of students in French

immersion, alternative schools, and other specialized schools and programs. Retrieved

from Toronto District School Board website:

http://www.tdsb.on.ca/Portals/0/community/community%20advisory%20committees/fsla

78

c/ support%20staff/programsofchoicestudentcharacteristics.pdf

Slevc, L. R., & Miyake, A. (2006). Individual Differences in Second- Language Proficiency

Does Musical Ability Matters?. Psychological Science, 17(8), 675–681.

Spalek, K., Franck, J., Schriefers, H., & Frauenfelder, U. H. (2008). Phonological regularities

and grammatical gender retrieval in spoken word recognition and word production.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 37, 419–442.

Surridge, M. E. (1993). Gender assignment in French: The hierarchy of rules and the chronology

of acquisition. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 31, 77–95.

Surridge, M. & Lesssard, G. (2008). Le Genre en Français: Quasi-Regularites de L'Attribution et

Fonction Grammaticale. Langues et Linguistique, 32, 181-218.

Swain, M., & Lapkin, S. (2005). The evolving sociopolitical context of immersion education in

Canada: some implications for program development. International Journal of Applied

Linguistics, 15(2), 169-186.

Taft, M., & Meunier, F. (1998). Lexical representation of gender: A quasiregular

domain. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27(1), 23-45.

Thorndike, E. L. (1923). The Influence of First-Year Latin Upon Ability to Read English. School

& Society, 17, 165-168.

Thornton, R. (1996). Elicited production. Methods for Assessing Children’s Syntax. 77–102.

Tsimpli, I. M., & Hulk, A. (2013). Grammatical gender and the notion of default: Insights from

language acquisition. Lingua, 137, 128–144.

Tucker, G., Lambert, W., & Rigault, A. (1977). The French speaker’s skill with grammatical

gender: An example of rule-governed behavior (Vol. 8). Mouton De Gruyter.

Tucker, G. R., (1968). French Speakers’ Skill with Grammatical Gender: An 'Example of Rule

Governed Behavior. (Unpublished doctoral disseratation). McGill University. Montreal.

79

Tucker, G. R., Lambert, W. E., Rigault, A., & Segalowitz, N. (1968). A psychological

investigation of French speakers' skill with grammatical gender. Journal of verbal

learning and verbal behavior, 7(2), 312-316.

Turnbull, M., Lapkin, S., Hart, D., & Swain, M. (1998). Time on task and immersion graduates’

French proficiency. In S. Lapkin (ed.), French second language education in Canada:

Empirical studies (pp. 31-55). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Unsworth, S. (2008). Age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch

ProQuest. Second Language Research, 24(3), 365–395.

Warden, M. (1997). The Effect of Form-focused Instruction on Control Over Grammatical

Gender by French Immersion Students in Grade 11. (Unpublished doctoral

disseratation). Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

Toronto.

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. (1991). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

Wechsler, D. (2005). Wechsler individual achievement test (2nd ed). San Antonio, TX:

Psychological Corporation.

Wesche, M. B. (2002). Early French immersion: How has the original Canadian model stood the

test of time? In P. Burmeister, T. Piske & A. Rohde (Eds.), An integrated view of

language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode (pp.357-379). Trier, Germany:

Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowska-Macgregor, M., & Leung, Y. K. I. (2004). Gender and

number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25(1), 105-133.

80

Appendix A

List of pseudowords13

Pseudowords with neutral

endings

Pseudowords with masculine

endings

Pseudowords with feminine

endings

fergadèle⁺ colcheau fralocture

suticoque⁺ moritrier troprine

flaumide⁺ lopisme blaquotte

chonlige* savouguin* possidelle*

bormispule⁺ bilacron cralibaine

jurmone⁺ sarnour sinourette*

bicatique* lucadour nasprelle

vécostiode⁺ quastrin cabagine

prucergone⁺ pliquachon* ploumiette

noplide⁺ vadanguier* rounoture

stongode⁺ naurisme jelaine

mauléroque⁺ bloukeau* braivotte

spadique*

derivige

cergatule⁺

cuipèle⁺

13 * Pseudowords that were used in Seigneuric et al. (2007). ⁺ Pseudowords that were used in Holmes and Dejean

de la Bâtie (1999).

81

Appendix B

The Determiner Task

Materials : none

Scoring : Circle 1 if the child correctly identifies the pseudoword marked for gender (based on

its ending). Circle 0 if the child incorrectly identifies the pseudoword marked for gender (based

on its ending). The total score is the total number of correct test items. There is no right or wrong

answer for nouns that are not marked for gender. All of the responses for unmarked pseudowords

will be counted to calculate the percentages of the feminine and the masculine.

Please note: un and une must be emphasized by the experimenter when addressing the

children. Do NOT provide any feedback to the child on any of the items (i.e., practice and test

items). Circle ONE answer only.

PRACTICE ITEMS: (please circle the determiner provided by the child)

1. J’ai inventé des nouveaux mots. Voici chulote. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu

préfèrerais dire un chulote ou une chulote? I have invented new words. This is chulote. Can you

please repeat the word? Do you prefer to say a (masculine) chulote or a (feminine) chulote?.

Child : une un chulote

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

2. J’ai inventé des nouveaux mots. Voici jattise. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu

préfèrerais dire une jattise ou un jattise? I have invented new words. This is jattise. Can you

please repeat the word? Do you prefer to say a (masculine) jattise or a (feminine) jattise?.

Child : une un jattise

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une jattise

3. J’ai inventé des nouveaux mots. Voici dostral. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu

préfèrerais dire un dostral ou une dostral? I have invented new words. This is dostral. Can you

please repeat the word? Do you prefer to say a (masculine) dostral or a (feminine) dostral?.

Child : une un dostral

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un dostral

Est-ce que tu as des questions? Do you have any questions? You may repeat the words if the

child does not hear them. Repeat the procedure for TEST items 1-20.

TEST ITEMS : (If the child says they do not know the answer, please ask them to choose

one anyways)

1. Voici fralocture. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une fralocture ou un

fralocture?

82

Child : une un fralocuture

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une fralocture

2. Voici colcheau. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un colcheau ou une

colcheau?

Child : une un colcheau

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un colcheau

3. Voici troprine. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une troprine ou un

troprine?

Child : une un troprine

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une troprine

4. Voici blaquotte. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un blaquotte ou une

blaquotte?

Child : une un blaquotte

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une blaquotte

5. Voici fergadèle. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une fergadèle ou un

fergadèle?

Child : une un fergadèle

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

6. Voici moritrier. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un moritrier ou une

moritrier?

Child : une un moritrier

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un moritrier

7. Voici suticoque. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une suticoque ou un

suticoque?

Child : une un suticoque

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

8. Voici flaumide. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un flaumide ou une

flaumide?

Child : une un flaumide

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

83

9. Voici lopisme. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une lopisme ou un

lopisme?

Child : une un lopisme

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un lopisme

10. Voici chonlige. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un chonlige ou une

chonlige?

Child : une un chonlige

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

11. Voici bormispule. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une bormispule ou

un bormispule?

Child : une un bormispule

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

12. Voici possidelle. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un possidelle ou une

possidelle?

Child : une un possidelle

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une possidelle

13. Voici cralibaine. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une cralibaine ou un

cralibaine?

Child : une un cralibaine

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une cralibaine

14. Voici jurmone. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un jurmone ou une

jurmone?

Child : une un jurmone

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

15. Voici savouguin. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une savouguin ou un

savouguin?

Child : une un savouguin

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un savouguin

84

16. Voici sinourette. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un sinourette ou une

sinourette?

Child : une un sinourette

Correct Answer : 1 0 Une sinourette

17. Voici bilacron. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une bilacron ou un

bilacron?

Child : une un bilacron

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un bilacron

18. Voici sarnour. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un sarnour ou une

sarnour?

Child : une un sarnour

Correct Answer : 0 1 Un sarnour

19. Voici bicatique. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire une bicatique ou un

bicatique?

Child : une un bicatique

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

20. Voici vécostiode. Peux-tu répéter le mot s’il te plaît? Tu préfèrerais dire un vécostiode ou

une vécostiode?

Child : une un vécostiode

Correct Answer : feminine masculine N/A

SCORING :

Total Feminine

Correct (/6)

*Question (1,

3, 4, 12, 13, 16)

Total

Masculine

Correct (/ 6)

*Question (2, 6,

9, 15, 17, 18)

Total Correct

(Feminine

+Masculine)

(/12)

Non- Marked

Nouns (/ 8)

*Question (5, 7,

8, 10, 11, 14, 19,

20)

Ratio (# of

masculine /8, # of

feminine /8)

Masculine

Feminine

85

Appendix C

The Picture Task

Materials : none

Scoring : Circle 1 if the child correctly identifies the pseudoword marked for gender (based on

its ending) with the gender of the stimulus. Circle 0 if the child incorrectly identifies the

pseudoword marked for gender (based on its ending) with the gender of the stimulus. The total

score is the total number of correct test items. There is no right or wrong answer for nouns that

are not marked for gender. All of the responses for unmarked pseudowords will be counted to

calculate the percentages of the feminine and the masculine.

Do NOT provide any feedback to the child on any of the items (i.e., practice and test items).

Circle ONE answer only.

PRACTICE ITEMS: (please circle the response provided by the child)

1. Regarde ces deux images. C’est un couple de personnes imaginaires. Montre-moi le garçon et

la fille. Écoute le mot «flaison ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait

s’appeler « flaison »? (Look at these pictures. This is a couple of imaginary beings (Martian-like

persons). Show me the girl and show me the boy. Listen to the invented word « flaison ». Who

would you prefer to call « flaison » between these two imaginary persons? »

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

2. Regarde ces deux images. C’est un couple de personnes imaginaires. Montre-moi le garçon et

la fille. Écoute le mot «laffrège ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait

s’appeler « laffrège »? (Look at these pictures. This is a couple of imaginary beings (Martian-like

persons). Show me the girl and show me the boy. Listen to the invented word « laffrège». Who

would you prefer to call « laffrège » between these two imaginary persons? »

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 1 0

3. Regarde ces deux images. C’est un couple de personnes imaginaires. Montre-moi le garçon et

la fille. Écoute le mot «tarcule ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait

s’appeler « tarcule »? (Look at these pictures. This is a couple of imaginary beings (Martian-like

persons). Show me the girl and show me the boy. Listen to the invented word « tarcule». Who

would you prefer to call « tarcule » between these two imaginary persons? »

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

Est-ce que tu as des questions? Do you have any questions? You may repeat the words if the

child does not hear them. Repeat the procedure for TEST items 1-20.

86

TEST ITEMS : (If the child says they do not know the answer, please ask them to choose

one anyways)

1. Écoute le mot «lucadour ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« lucadour »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 1 0

2. Écoute le mot «nasprelle». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« nasprelle »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

3. Écoute le mot «cabagine». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« cabagine»?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

4. Écoute le mot «quastrin ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« quastrin »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 1 0

5. Écoute le mot «prucergone ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« prucergone »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

6. Écoute le mot «pliquachon ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« pliquachon »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 1 0

7. Écoute le mot «vadanguier ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« vadanguier »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

87

Correct Answer : 1 0

8. Écoute le mot «ploumiette ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« ploumiette »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

9. Écoute le mot «noplide ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« noplide »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

10. Écoute le mot «rounoture ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« rounoture »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

11. Écoute le mot «stongode ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« stongode »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/ A N/ A

12. Écoute le mot «jelaine ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« jelaine »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

13. Écoute le mot « mauléroque ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait

s’appeler « mauléroque »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/ A

14. Écoute le mot « spadique ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« spadique »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

88

15. Écoute le mot «braivotte ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« braivotte »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 0 1

16. Écoute le mot « derivige ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« derivige »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

17. Écoute le mot « naurisme ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« naurisme »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 1 0

18. Écoute le mot « bloukeau ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« bloukeau »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : 1 0

19. Écoute le mot « cergatule ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« cergatule »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

20. Écoute le mot « cuipèle ». C’est un mot que j’ai inventé. Montre-moi qui pourrait s’appeler

« cuipèle »?

Child : Male Martian Female Martian

Correct Answer : N/A N/A

89

SCORING :

Total Feminine

Correct (/6)

*Question (2,

3, 8, 10, 12, 15)

Total

Masculine

Correct (/ 6)

*Question (1, 4,

6, 7, 17, 18)

Total Correct

(Feminine

+Masculine)

(/12)

Non- Marked

Nouns (/ 8)

*Question (5, 9,

11, 13, 14, 16, 19,

20)

Ratio (# of

masculine /8, # of

feminine /8)

Masculine

Feminine

90

Appendix D

Martians used in the Picture Task

91

Appendix E

Bias Value Calculations Obtained from the Lexique Database

Ending

Number of

Entries

Number of Masculine

Entries

Number of Feminine

Entries

Proportion of Masculine

Entries

Proportion of Feminine

Entries

ine 508 38 470 .07 .93

ette 430 18 412 .04 .96

otte 59 6 53 .10 .90

elle 173 11 162 .06 .94

ure 353 40 313 .11 .89

aine 90 12 78 .13 .87

on 1039 745 294 .72 .28

eau 202 196 6 .97 .03

ier 545 543 2 .99 .01

in 505 494 11 .98 .02

isme 485 485 0 1 0

our 54 50 4 .93 .07

ode 24 12 12 .50 .50

oque 33 16 17 .48 .52

ique 193 65 128 .34 .66

èle 15 6 9 .40 .60

ule 132 51 81 .39 .61

ige 20 12 8 .60 .40

one 79 52 27 .66 .34

ide 67 46 21 .69 .31