A psychological investigation of French speakers' skill with grammatical gender

Possible cues for the determination of the grammatical gender of French nouns were investigated by asking young French speakers to choose the gender of both rarely occurring nouns and invented words. Certain endings (e.g., - aix, - illon, - tion) were found to indicate gender reliably. Other endings...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 1968-01, Vol.7 (2), p.312-316
Main Authors: Tucker, G.R., Lambert, W.E., Rigault, A., Segalowitz, N.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Possible cues for the determination of the grammatical gender of French nouns were investigated by asking young French speakers to choose the gender of both rarely occurring nouns and invented words. Certain endings (e.g., - aix, - illon, - tion) were found to indicate gender reliably. Other endings, however, (e.g., - eure, - oire) were found to be ambiguous markers. These findings correspond well to the relation between gender form and noun ending existing in the corpus of all French nouns. Results also indicated that the initial syllable of a noun may have an effect in marking grammatical gender, especially in cases where the ending provides only an ambiguous cue. The implications of these findings for those concerned with the acquisition of French, either as a first or as a second language, are discussed.
ISSN:0022-5371
0749-596X
DOI:10.1016/S0022-5371(68)80007-6