Grammatical gender assignment in French: dispelling the native speaker myth. Issue 1 (20th July 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: AYOUN, DALILA
• Is Part Of: Journal of French language studies. Volume 28:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 113
• Page End: 148
• Publication Date: 2017-07-20
• Subjects: French language -- Periodicals; 440.5
• DOI: 10.1017/S095926951700014X
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0959-2695

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This study highlights the complexity of French grammatical gender as a lexical property at the interface of morpho-phonology and the lexicon. French native speakers (n = 168) completed a gender assignment task with written stimuli illustrating common versus uncommon nouns, vowel-initial versus consonant-initial nouns, compounds and grammatical homonyms; they also indicated the strategies they used to assign a gender to stimuli. The findings showed strong lexical and gender effects suggesting that grammatical gender must be acquired for individual lexical items as morpho-phonological cues alone are unreliable and vary greatly.