L2 grammatical gender in a complex morphological system: The case of German
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Patti Spinner
Abstract
In order to determine the nature of naturalistic learners' difficulty with grammatical gender in a complex morphological system, the longitudinal production data of an early naturalistic L1-Italian and L1-Turkish learner who are acquiring German are examined in light of current theories of gender within Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program. After analyzing the speakers' marking on determiners, adjectives and pronouns, we conclude that these learners' errors in the gender of German nouns are the result of at least four factors: inadequate lexical learning, mapping difficulty, processing pressure, and parsing errors that cause the paradigm to be inadequately learned. These factors may be particularly problematic for learners acquiring a system such as the one in German, where gender marking is conflated with case and number on determiners, adjectives and pronouns.
©Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- The natural approach to adult learning and teaching of L2 grammar
- L2 grammatical gender in a complex morphological system: The case of German
- Concurrent think-aloud protocol as a socially situated construct
- Raising learner-initiated attention to the formal aspects of their oral production through transcription and stimulated reflection
- External reviewers
- Index of articles in Volume 46 (2008)
Articles in the same Issue
- The natural approach to adult learning and teaching of L2 grammar
- L2 grammatical gender in a complex morphological system: The case of German
- Concurrent think-aloud protocol as a socially situated construct
- Raising learner-initiated attention to the formal aspects of their oral production through transcription and stimulated reflection
- External reviewers
- Index of articles in Volume 46 (2008)
