RELATING GENDER ERRORS TO MORPHOSYNTAX AND

LEXICON IN ADVANCED FRENCH INTERLANGUAGE

Jean-Marc Dewaele

Daniel Véronique

Abstract:

An correlational analysis between accuracy levels of

gender agreement -based on an analysis of 519 gender

errors out of 9378 modifiers in the advanced French

interlanguage of 27 Flemish L1 speakers- and

morphosyntactic and lexical variables, revealed a clear

negative relationship between the number of gender errors

and fluency variables. No relation was found between

gender errors and other types of agreement errors. This

suggests that more advanced learners, whose interlanguage

speech production process is more automatised or

proceduralised, do commit fewer gender errors but that

good mastery of gender agreement does not imply an

equally good mastery of other types of agreement.

1

Introduction*

Perfect command of morphology seems to elude even the

most advanced second language learners (Bartning 1997).

One particular morphological problem that besets learners

of French in particular is mastering gender agreement.

Numerous studies have shown that even very advanced

learners continue to make gender errors (Surridge &

Lessard 1984, Carroll 1989, Surridge 1993, Dewaele 1994,

Bartning 1999a & b, Dewaele & Véronique 1999).

The question we will address in the present paper is

whether these advanced learners display similar mastery

of other morphological and lexical rules and in what

measure production in French interlanguage (IL) is

determined by the processing of gender.

The resulting picture should allow us to develop a

better understanding of the link between different

subsystems in the IL and could provide an insight in the

processes of gender retrieval and agreement during IL

speech production.

2

Gender in French

French distinguishes two grammatical genders: masculine

and feminine (Grevisse 1980, Surridge 1996). Gender is

partly an inherent diacritic feature of French nouns, the

value of which has to be acquired individually for every

lexical entry stored in the mental lexicon (gender

attribution). Koehn (1994) found that gender of

morphologically simple nouns is partly predictable on the

basis of their phonological characteristics. Her corpus

analysis of the Petit Larousse revealed that more than

97% of the nouns with the endings: are

masculine.

Gender is also ‘a derivative property of specifiers such

as determiners and adjectives’ (Carroll 1989:545). The

gender feature to the noun can thus trigger gender

agreement among modifying expressions under precise

syntactic conditions (1989:546). The conceptual gender

difference in generally associated with the grammatical

gender difference.

Gender opposition is inaudible in two thirds of the

adjectivesi. This proportion decreases to one half in

3

written language (Riegel et al. 1994:359). The form-

function relationship for gender in adjective is

relatively simple according to Schane (1968) and Blanche

Benveniste (1990). Masculine forms are created by

suppressing the final ‘e’ in feminine forms (see table

1).

INSERT TABLE 1

Gender opposition in determiners only exists in the

singular as can be seen in the following tables:

INSERT TABLE 1

INSERT TABLE 2

Previous work

There are three other studies that use Pienemann’s

Processability Theory (1998) as a theoretical framework

for analysis of gender agreement, namely Bartning (1999a

and 1999b), using the InterFra corpus, and Dewaele &

Véronique (1999) who set out to investigate the factors

that affect accuracy rates for gender agreement in

advanced French IL and present a number of

psycholinguistic hypotheses concerning the ontogenesis of

4

gender errors. As Pienemann’s (1998) predicts that

“structures involving no exchange of grammatical

information between constituent can be processed before

structures that do require such information exchanges”

(1998:76), it seemed reasonable to assume that if this

prediction is correct, one would still be able to detect

traces in more advanced ILs. Structures are that acquired

early could be expected to attain a higher degree of

automaticity and accuracy in later stages. Accuracy rates

for gender agreement were however found to be higher

within phrase constituents (involving determiners and

attributive adjectives) than across constituents

(predicative adjectives), but a t-test revealed that this

difference is not significant (t = -1.4, df = 26, ns).

This means that constituent boundaries do not

significantly affect accuracy rates in gender agreement

in the data. Similarly, Bartning (1999a) in her

longitudinal analysis of advanced French IL produced by 4

Swedish L1 speakers, found that accuracy of gender

agreement for 189 attributive adjectives was not

consistently higher than that for 205 predicative

5

adjectives. In a follow-on paper, Bartning (1999b)

extended her analysis of gender agreement to determiners

in the IL of 6 advanced speakers and also included

material from 9 pre-advanced learners. The earlier

finding was confirmed for advanced learners but not for

pre-advanced learners. The latter were found to obtain

higher adjectival gender agreement accuracy rates in

attributive adjectives than in predicative adjectivesii,

which would be in line with Pienemann’s predictions.

Pienemann (1998) assumes that synchronic variation in

accuracy rates results from different use of grammatical

rules across different tasks (1998:297) and specific

lexical requirements produced by the individual

communicative tasks (1998:308). Synchronic variation has,

according to Pienemann, more to do with concepts like

“data density” and “percentage of rule application”.

Dewaele & Véronique (1999) found a large amount of intra-

individual and interindividual variation. The non-

application of the agreement rule which stops the

diacritic information from arriving at its destination is

only one of several possible scenarios to account for

6

gender errors. The correct diacritic information could be

attached to the lemma, but the phrasal or S-procedures

may fail to deliver the information systematically to all

modifiers, in which case the monitor can intercept

certain errors and produce the correct form later.

Another possibility is that no diacritic information

concerning gender is attached to the lemma, resulting in

free variation or transfer of the gender feature from

other activated lemmata in the speaker’s L1 or other ILs.

A final possibility is that the lemma contains the wrong

diacritic information resulting in systematic gender

errors for certain nouns. This could the consequence of

overgeneralisation of certain phonological gender rules

(Koehn 1994).

An ANOVA revealed that interindividual variation

depended less on the amount of formal instruction the

learner had enjoyed in the target language and more on

the frequency with which s/he declared to use the TL

outside the classroom (Dewaele & Véronique 1999).

7

Rationale

Linguistic variables in interlanguage studies are

usually analysed in isolation (Bartning 1997). We feel

that by looking at the relation between different aspects

of the learner’s speech production process and by

relating morphology, lexicon and syntax we might gain a

better understanding of the interlanguage system as a

whole. Our decision to examine the relationship between

gender agreement and other types of agreement errors,

iFootnotes

* We wish to thank Inge Bartning and Jürgen Meisel for

their excellent suggestions.

? The proportions are very similar in our interlanguage

corpus produced in the informal situation (cf. section on

methodology) where 65% of adjective types were invariable

(representing 40% of adjective tokens). The proportion of

invariable adjective types dropped to 47% in the corpus

produced in the formal situation (representing 39% of

adjective tokens).

ii This result should be interpreted with caution as it is

based on a very small sample.

8

fluency, complexity, lexical richness, and style choice

in our corpus of advanced French IL is based on the fact

that these variables encompass the working of the whole

model as described by Levelt (1989) and Pienemann (1998).

The nature of these variables is very different but they

were shown to be highly interrelated (Dewaele 1999). We

will, more specifically, address the following five

research questions:

1) Do determiners or adjectives best reflect the

learner’s knowledge of gender for a particular noun ?

Dewaele & Véronique (1999) found that gender agreement is

more often correct in determiners than in adjectives.

This finding would be reinforced if we were to find

higher correlations between gender accuracy rates for

determiners (rather than adjectives) and that of the

various linguistic variables.

2) Are gender agreement errors in modifiers caused by

the problems at the level of diacritical information

exchange ? If that were the case, one would expect

similar problems for number and person agreement. An

absence of correlation between these different types of

9

agreement errors would suggest that agreement errors in

advanced ILs are no longer caused by problems at the

level of diacritical information exchange.

3) Are gender agreement errors linked to processing

problems ? Uncertainty about the gender of a noun might

force the speaker to slow his production down and

allocate extra resources to solve the problem (Towell et

al. 1996). This increased monitoring could be reflected

in lower speech rates, an increase in filled pauses and

in shorter utterances.

4) Is the mastery of gender agreement related to the

size of the learner’s actively used vocabulary ? More

advanced learners could be expected to have a larger

vocabulary but could that lead to higher accuracy in

gender agreement ? These advanced learners could have

developed a larger number of rules of thumb (Carroll

1989) or phonological gender rules (Koehn 1994) allowing

them to make less gender errors.

5) Is the decrease in the number of gender errors linked

to the learner’s capacity to produce more implicit speech

(Dewaele 1993a) ? One could expect a significant

10

correlation between these two indicators of IL

development.

Methodology

Participants

Twenty-seven university students, 8 female and 19 male,

aged between 18 and 21, participated in the experiment.

They had taken French at a high school level (3 to 5 hours

a week) for 6 to 8 years. Their interlanguage could be

described as “advanced” (Bartning 1997). The subjects were

administered a sociobiographical questionnaire.

Linguistic material

Conversations were recorded with the 27 subjects in a

stressful and a neutral situation. The stressful situation

consisted of an oral exam of about ten minutes that aimed

at evaluating the learners’ proficiency in the target-

language. Topics were politics, economics and the

subjects’ performance for other exams. In all 5 hours of

speech (17,613 words) were recorded. The neutral situation

involved conversations between the same researcher and

subjects in a relaxed atmosphere. There was no time-

11

restriction. Topics covered studies, hobbies, politics. In

all 15 hours of speech (35,021 words) were recorded. The

recordings were transcribed by the researcher into

orthographical French. These transcriptions were then

coded at the word level according to their grammatical

nature and possible lexical or morphological errors. We

singled out 519 gender errors out of 9378 modifiers.

We reported earlier that the identification of gender

errors is not always easy in French as some adjectives

share the same form for the masculine and the feminine.

In these cases we did not count the form as a gender

error even thought is probably was. This means that the

total number of gender errors for adjectives in our

corpus is probably higher. The following utterance

illustrates the problem:

Richard Informal 1132. Acheter un télé, une, un auto

très cher(e), mais lentement je veux consumer les dix

millionsiii.

iii Every utterance is preceded by the (fictional) name of

the speaker, the type of interview ( Informal or Formal)

and the number of the utterance in the corpus.

12

‘To buy a television, a (fem.), a (masc.) very expensive

(masc. or fem.) car , but I want to spend the ten

millions very slowly.’

The speaker clearly hesitates about the gender of

‘auto’, first using the correct feminine indefinite

article, followed by a pause and then using the incorrect

masculine indefinite, the noun, an adverb and then an

adjective where the gender difference is inaudible.

Analysis

We will now examine the accuracy rates (percentage of

target-like usage) for gender agreement and their

relations to the other morphosyntactic and lexical

variables. Dewaele & Véronique (1999) assumed that the

most advanced learners had a greater automatisation of

the linguistic knowledge which allowed them to spend less

time on the retrieval of gender information. It is

therefore highly probable that accuracy rates for gender

agreement will correlate with temporal variables as these

reflect the smooth running of the learner’s speech

production process.

13

Proportion of other types of agreement errors

Six types of morphological and 4 types of lexical errors

were calculated in Dewaele (1993a, 1994) as well as the

variation in morpholexical accuracy rates for all word

classes as well as the variation in proportions of

particular error types across word classes. The present

analysis concentrates on the 3 types of morphological

errors involving agreement: gender agreement, number

agreement and person agreement in verbs. We checked to see

whether the proportion of gender agreement errors is

linked to the two other types of agreement errors. This

turned out not to be the case: the correlation with the

proportion of number agreement errors was entirely non-

significant in the informal situation (r = - .13, ns.) and

the formal situation (r = - .02, ns); the correlation with

the proportion of person agreement errors in finite verbs

was negative without reaching statistical significance in

the informal situation (r = - .36, p < .07) and was close

to zero in the formal situation (r = .01, ns).

INSERT TABLE 4

14

Speech rates

The speech rate gives us a global idea of the efficiency

of the speech production process (Levelt 1989). Higher

speech rates suggest a higher degree of automaticity in

the speech production, lower speech rates on the other

hand can be an indication of more controlled processing,

requiring speakers to pay attention to the processing

while it is happening (Towell et al. 1996, Dewaele 1998a).

These controlled processes are tightly capacity-limited.

A Pearson correlation revealed a strong positive

correlation between accuracy rates for gender agreement of

determiners and speech rate, in the informal situation (r

= .74, p < .0001) as well as in the formal situation (r

= .47, p < .015). A slightly weaker but still significant

correlation was found between speech rate and accuracy

rates for gender agreement of adjectives in the formal

situation (r = .46, p < .02) but the correlation was non-

significant in the informal situation (r = .24, ns). These

results suggest that fluent speakers make fewer gender

errors.

15

Hesitation phenomena

Hesitations, often followed by editing expressions such

as ‘er’, are generally interpreted as evidence of

cognitive activity. The ‘er’ may serve to signal to the

addressee that there is trouble and that the source of the

trouble is still actual (Levelt 1989:484). These editing

expressions are especially common in L2 production after

errors or before lexical gaps (Dewaele 1996b). They can,

however, also be a sign that the incremental processing is

breaking down (Levelt 1989).

The proportion of filled pauses correlated negatively

with accuracy rates for gender agreement of determiners in

the informal situation (r = - .57, p < .002) and in the

formal situation (r = - .55, p < .003). A similar

correlation appeared between the proportion of filled

pauses and gender agreement of adjectives in the formal

situation (r = - .48, p < .02), but the difference was

non-significant in the informal situation (r = -.10, ns).

This suggests that a higher proportion of filled pauses is

linked to lower accuracy rates for gender agreement.

16

Length of utterance

Mean length of utterance can provide an interesting

insight in the learners’ capacity to build complex

structures in their interlanguage and is often considered

as another measure of fluency (Dewaele 1995b). It also

reflects the development of the IL (Towell et al.

1996:112). We used a formula based on the mean length of

the 3 longest utterances in a speech extract (MLU3).

A non-significant negative Pearson correlation emerges

between the MLU3 scores and accuracy rates for gender

agreement in determiners in the informal situation (r =

-.36, p < .07) which becomes positive and significant in

the formal situation (r = .46, p < .02). Accuracy rates

for gender agreement in adjectives did not correlate with

MLU3 scores in the informal situation (r = -.06, ns) nor

in the formal situation (r = .15, ns). This suggests that

speakers who produce their longest utterances in the

informal situation make more gender errors in determiners

while those who produce their longest utterances in the

formal situation make fewer gender errors in determiners.

This could be interpreted as a sign that the learners

17

producing their longest utterance in the informal

situation are not the same as the ones producing their

longest utterances in the formal situation. A similar

conclusion was reached in an earlier study where it

appeared that more introvert speakers produce their

longest utterances in the informal situation but not in

the formal situation (Dewaele 1999).

Lexical richness

Dewaele (1993b) found significant negative correlations

between lexical richness scores and measures of fluency in

the formal situation. When more cognitive resources are

diverted to lexical searching, the speech production slows

down. Is there a link however between the size of

learners’ active vocabulary and their knowledge of

morphological information of the lemmata ?

A Pearson correlation suggests that this is partly true

but that is varies according to the situation. Lexical

richness scores correlated positively with accuracy rates

for gender agreement in determiners in the informal

situation (r = .37, p < .06) but not in the formal

situation (r = -.19, ns). Accuracy rates for gender

18

agreement in adjectives did not correlate with lexical

richness scores in the informal situation (r = .06, ns)

nor in the formal situation (r = .11, ns)

The choice of speech-style

In Dewaele (1995a) it was explained that the perception

that speakers have of the formality of the situation leads

to make different pragmatic choices. The choice of speech

style will depend on the need of the speaker to be

unambiguously understood and is decided in the

conceptualiser (Levelt 1989). This decision is reflected

in the proportion of ‘deictical’ word classes in the

speech extracts and was measured as follows: for each of

two situations (informal and formal), a separate factor

analysis was performed on the proportion at token-level of

nouns, determiners, prepositions, verbs, pronouns, adverbs

and conjunctions in the French interlanguage of the

participants. Each time, two main orthogonal factors

appeared. The first dimension, which explains over 50% of

the variance, was called ‘implicitness/explicitness’. The

nouns, modifiers and prepositions obtained strong negative

loadings on this factor, as opposed to the pronouns,

19

adverbs, and verbs which obtained high positive loadings.

The nouns, modifiers and prepositions are thus situated

near the explicit end of this dimension, in contrast to

the pronouns, adverbs, and verbs on the implicit end on

the continuum. This grouping of word classes does not

reflect the traditional dichotomy of ‘grammatical’ versus

‘lexical’ words (Dewaele 1995a, 1996a). A speaker who

wants to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation of his/her

words, she/he relies as little as possible on the spatio-

temporal context they share with the interlocutor(s). This

is achieved by explicit and precise description of the

elements of the context needed to disambiguate the

expression, hence the decrease of deictical words. As

these deictical words are short and of high-frequency,

they can be retrieved and articulated more quickly. Any

decrease of deictical words will hence inevitably hamper

fluency.

A Pearson correlation between individual factor scores of

our subjects on the ‘implicitness/explicitness’ dimension

and accuracy rates for gender agreement in determiners

revealed positive relations in the informal situation (r =

20

.48, p < .02) and non-significant negative relations in

the formal situation (r = -.28, ns). The speakers who

opted for more implicit speech styles in the informal

situation thus tended to make fewer gender errors but that

relation disappeared in the formal situation. Accuracy

rates for gender agreement in adjectives did not correlate

significantly with implicitness scores in the informal

situation (r = .28, ns) nor in the formal situation (r =

-.29, ns)

Tables 5 and 6 present an overview of the results of the

correlation analyses between the different variables and

the gender accuracy rates for the determiners and the

adjectives.

INSERT TABLE 5

INSERT TABLE 6

Discussion

It is striking to observe how much weaker the

correlations are between the linguistic variables and

gender accuracy rates for adjectives compared to those

for determiners. This finding further supports the

finding that gender accuracy rates for adjectives and

21

determiners are very different in advanced ILsiv, the

former being significantly lower (Dewaele & Véronique

1999, Bartning 1999b). It thus seems that determiners

present a better reflection of the advanced learner’s

knowledge of the diacritic information concerning gender

for a particular noun than adjectives. The latter are

lower frequency words of higher morphophonological

complexity bound to present lexeme selection problems for

the learner. In other words, a gender error in an

adjective is more likely to be only an “apparent” gender

error. The learner, possessing the correct diacritic

information for gender and knowing the agreement rules,

activates the matching lemma, but might be unable to

produce the lexeme with the specification (+ feminine).

Meisel (personal communication) suggests that learners

associate a particular determiner with any new noun they

acquire. Hence the increased likelihood of the correct

determiner being produced with any noun, contrary to

adjectives whose link with nouns is much weaker.

The lack of significant correlations between gender

errors and other types of agreement errors suggests that

22

the errors in advanced IL do not occur because of a

deficient exchange of diacritical information. Gender

errors seemed rather linked to processing problems.

Indeed, lower gender accuracy was correlated to speech

rates, filled pauses and utterance length. Speakers with

a poorer knowledge of the gender of nouns might monitor

this problem more intensely and more often, hence

creating an adverse effect on their fluency. This

reinforces the view expressed in Dewaele & Véronique

(1999) that gender errors can have many different causes

and do not necessarily reflect agreement problems.

The link between mastery of gender agreement and lexical

richness was found to be situation-dependent and/or

discourse domain-dependent. It is positive in the

informal situation but disappears in the formal

situation. One possible explanation is that speakers may

have speedy access to the gender for words belonging to

discourse domains they are more familiar with, but that

this process is slower and more prone to errors once the

conversation covers less familiar discourse domains asiv Bartning (1999b) found that pre-advanced leaners had

lower accuracy rates for determiners than for adjectives.

23

was the case in the formal situation. These advanced

learners could indeed have developed a larger number of

rules of thumb (Carroll 1989) or phonological gender

rules (Koehn 1994) allowing them to make less gender

errors, but the stress of the formal situation might

impair their application.

The final research question was concerned with the link

between gender errors and style-choice. The relation

turned out to be situation-dependent too. Speakers who

make fewer gender errors choose more implicit speech-

styles in the informal situation, which can be

interpreted as a sign of confidence and of a more

developed IL. The link disappears in the formal

situation. Possible reasons for this are less familiar

discourse domains and the stress of the exam situation

which strongly affects the performance of more

introverted speakers (Dewaele 1999).

Conclusion

We analysed the link between accuracy rates for gender

agreement and morpho-lexical variables, indicators of

fluency, lexical richness and utterance length in order

24

to gain a better view of the link between different

subsystems in the IL. The analyses allow us to draw the

following portrait of the learners who make fewer gender

errors: they are fluent, confident enough in the informal

situation to use implicit styles. This suggests that for

these speakers lemma selection and retrieval of diacritic

information concerning gender does not mobilise too great

a share of available cognitive resources, although

increased formality of the situation might alter the

picture.

It was suggested that gender errors are not necessarily

the result of problems with agreement rules, neither do

they automatically imply that the diacritic information

for gender in the noun is absent or wrong. Determiners

were found to give a better reflection of the learner’s

knowledge of the gender of a noun than adjectives.

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All correspondence concerning this article should be

addressed to:

Jean-Marc Dewaele, School for Languages, Literature and

Culture, Birkbeck College, University of London, 43

29

Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD. e-mail:

j.dewaele@bbk.ac.uk

Daniel Véronique, UFR Didactique du Français langue

étrangère, Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle.

30

Table 1: Form/function relationship for French adjectives

singular plural

Masculine - e - e(s)

Feminine + e + e(s)

Table 2: Form/function relationship for French articles

indefinite definite partitive

singular plural singularplural singular plural

Masculine un des le les du des

Feminine une des la les de la des

31

Table 3: Form/function relationship for other French

determiners

singular plural

masculine à l’/au aux

ce ces

son ses

feminine à la aux

cette ces

sa ses

Table 4: Correlations between the proportion of gender

agreement errors and other types of agreement errors :

Variable Informal

Situation

Formal

Situation

number agreement -.13 -.02

person agreement -.36 .01

* p < .05

32

Table 5: Correlations between accuracy in gender

agreement for determiners and different linguistic

variables in the informal and formal situations

Variable Informal

Situation

Formal

Situation

Speech rates .74*** .47*

Proportion of filled

pauses

-.57** -.55**

Lexical richness .37 -.19

MLU3 -.35 .46*

Implicit speech-

style

.48* -.28

* p < .05

** p < .01

*** p < .001

33

Table 6: Correlations between accuracy in gender

agreement for adjectives and different linguistic

variables in the informal and formal situations

Variable Informal

Situation

Formal

Situation

Speech rates .24 .46*

Proportion of filled

pauses

-.10 -.48*

Lexical richness .06 .11

MLU3 -.06 .15

Implicit speech-

style

.28 -.29

* p < .05

** p < .01

34