Gender in Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Acquisition

Afaaf Ebrahim

The development of gender in simultaneous and Successive bilingual acquisition of French - Evidence 

Introduction

The main topic of the study is to look into whether the age of onset acquisition, the quality and quantity of the concept of gender within the French language, depending on if French was learned simultaneously with another language growing up, or if French was considered the L2 language growing up. Earlier studies have shown that gender assignment within the French language has the same set of difficulties across the board regardless of the age of acquisition or whether French was acquired as a 2L1 or cL2 language. (Carroll, 1989) (Clark, 1985). (Meisel, 2008) also argued that the age of onset acquisition also determines the development of a language in general, stating that the cutoff is around 3-4 years old. This study combines multiple aspects that have been previously tested and manipulates multiple factors in order to find if there's any significant effect within the interaction of multiple variables, which other research has yet to do.  The author predicted that there could be differences between L1, 2L1, and cL2, mostly between 2L and cL2 within the input factor of gender in the French language. The author also argued that if the development of gender within the French language acquisition was primarily as a result of the age of onset of acquisition, then there would be little to no differences between L1 and 2L1 kids, but there would be a difference between the L1 and cL2 children. (word count: 236 words)

Methods

There were a total of 12 participants in the study who were selected from a French school. All were children who were either monolingual French-speaking, with two parents who spoke French (L1), Bilingual Swedish-French children who had one French-speaking parent (2L1), or Swedish-speaking children with two Swedish speaking parents (cL2). Three features of the French language, the abstract gender feature, gender assignment, and gender concord were observed by recording the children in a roll 3with either a native French speaker and a native Swedish speaker. Each recording was about half an hour long and had 2 different aspects to it: conversations about different points in time (past, present, future), and different elicitation conversations, narratives or stories, as well specific tests. These recording sessions were done once every 3-5 months for a matter of years. The recordings were then coded for gender assignment, gender concord, and the understanding of gender as a feature of the French language. (word count: 156 words)

Discussion

The discussion section focuses on three explanations as to why there is no age difference as to gender as an abstract of the French language within cL2 speakers. First, that the abstract gender feature has limited grammatical and semantic effects. The second explanation could be that gender is so prominent in the French language that even children with a low input or exposure to French pick up on the concept of gender as an abstract feature of the language. Third, the alternative language of these children, Swedish, is also gendered, so it would be easy for these children to make the assumption that French is also gendered. In 2L1 children, their input scores and rate of development directly correlated with their use of French gender assignment, while this correlation was not found in cL2 speakers, but instead, an age of onset acquisition in younger cL2 speakers was found to be of significance to how well they could assign genders in their speech. Since gender concord was only assigned at the group level, individual differences couldn't be accounted for. It was found that L1 children performed the best, almost at a perfect rate, and there wasn't a difference between their performances and 2L1 children's performances. The performance rate for gender concord of L1 and 2L1 children also wasn't significant compared to their performance rate for gender assignment. The cL2 group, on the other hand, performed significantly lower on gender concord than they did on gender assignment, meaning there has to be some disconnect for age of onset acquisition. (word count: 257 words)

References:

Granfeldt, J. (2016) 'The development of gender in simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition of French - Evidence for AOA and input effects', Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, , pp. 1-20. doi: 10.1017/S1366728916001140.