Relating gender errors to morphosyntax and lexicon in advanced French interlanguage

d:/3d/stul/54-2/dewaele.3d ± 23/6/0 ± 19:8 ± SET/SR&NP

RELATING GENDER ERRORS TOMORPHOSYNTAX AND LEXICON IN

ADVANCED FRENCH INTERLANGUAGE

Jean-Marc Dewaele & Daniel VeÂronique

Abstract. An correlational analysis between accuracy levels of gender agreement± based on an analysis of 519 gender errors out of 9378 modifiers inthe advanced French interlanguage of 27 Flemish L1 speakers- andmorphosyntactic and lexical variables, revealed a clear negative relationshipbetween the number of gender errors and fluency variables. No relation wasfound between gender errors and other types of agreement errors. This suggeststhat more advanced learners, whose interlanguage speech production process ismore automatised or proceduralised, do commit fewer gender errors but thatgood mastery of gender agreement does not imply an equally good mastery ofother types of agreement.

1. Introduction*

Perfect command of morphology seems to elude even the most advancedsecond language learners (Bartning 1997). One particular morphologicalproblem that besets learners of French in particular is mastering genderagreement. Numerous studies have shown that even very advancedlearners continue to make gender errors (Surridge & Lessard 1984,Carroll 1989, Surridge 1993, Dewaele 1994, Bartning 1999, this volume,Dewaele & VeÂronique to appear).

The question we will address in the present paper is whether theseadvanced learners display similar mastery of other morphological andlexical 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 understandingof the link between different subsystems in the IL and could provide aninsight in the processes of gender retrieval and agreement during ILspeech production.

2. Gender in French

French distinguishes two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine(Grevisse 1980, Surridge 1996). Gender is partly an inherent diacriticfeature of French nouns, the value of which has to be acquired indi-vidually for every lexical entry stored in the mental lexicon (genderattribution). Koehn (1994) found that gender of morphologically

Studia Linguistica 54(2) 2000, pp. 212±224. # The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica 2000.Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK, and350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

* We wish to thank Inge Bartning and JuÈrgen Meisel for their excellent suggestions.


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: [aÄ], [E~], [o] 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 pre-

cise 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 adjectives.1 This

proportion decreases to one half in 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).Gender opposition in determiners only exists in the singular as can be

seen in the following tables:

3. 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 (1999 and this volume), using the InterFra corpus,

and Dewaele & VeÂronique (to appear) who set out to investigate the

factors that affect accuracy rates for gender agreement in advanced

Relating Gender Errors to Morphosyntax and Lexicon 213

# The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica 2000.

1 The proportions are very similar in our interlanguage corpus produced in the informalsituation (cf. section on methodology) where 65% of adjective types were invariable(representing 40% of adjective tokens). The proportion of invariable adjective types droppedto 47% in the corpus produced in the formal situation (representing 39% of adjective tokens).

Table 2: Form/function relationship for French articles

indefinite definite partitive

singular plural singular plural singular plural

Masculine un des le les du des

Feminine une des la les de la des

Table 1: Form/function relationship for Frenchadjectives

singular plural

Masculine ÿe ÿe(s)

Feminine �e �e(s)


French IL and present a number of psycholinguistic hypotheses concern-

ing the ontogenesis of gender errors. As Pienemann's (1998) predicts that

`structures involving no exchange of grammatical information between

constituents 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 attributable

adjectives) than across constituents (predicative adjectives), but a t-test

revealed that this difference is not significant (t � ÿ1:4, df � 26, ns). This

means that constituent boundaries do not significantly affect accuracy

rates in gender agreement in the data. Similarly, Bartning (1999) 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 adjectives. In a follow-on paper, Bartning (this volume)

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 adjectives,2 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

214 Jean-Marc Dewaele and Daniel VeÂronique


Table 3: Form/function relationship for otherFrench determiners

singular plural

masculine aÁ l'/au aux

ce ces

son ses

feminine aÁ la aux

cette ces

sa ses

2 This result should be interpreted with caution as it is based on a very small sample.


of rule application'. Dewaele & VeÂronique (1999) found a large amountof intra-individual and interindividual variation. The non-application ofthe agreement rule which stops the diacritic information from arriving atits destination is only one of several possible scenarios to account forgender errors. The correct diacritic information could be attached to thelemma, but the phrasal or S-procedures may fail to deliver the informa-tion systematically to all modifiers, in which case the monitor canintercept certain errors and produce the correct form later. Anotherpossibility is that no diacritic information concerning gender is attachedto the lemma, resulting in free variation or transfer of the gender featurefrom other activated lemmata in the speaker's L1 or other ILs. A finalpossibility is that the lemma contains the wrong diacritic informationresulting in systematic gender errors for certain nouns. This could theconsequence of overgeneralisation of certain phonological gender rules(Koehn 1994).

An ANOVA revealed that interindividual variation depended less onthe amount of formal instruction the learner had enjoyed in the targetlanguage and more on the frequency with which s/he declared to use theTL outside the classroom (Dewaele & VeÂronique to appear).

4. Rationale

Linguistic variables in interlanguage studies are usually analysed inisolation (Bartning 1997). We feel that by looking at the relationbetween different aspects of the learner's speech production processand by relating morphology, lexicon and syntax we might gain a betterunderstanding of the interlanguage system as a whole. Our decision toexamine the relationship between gender agreement and other types ofagreement errors, fluency, complexity, lexical richness, and style choicein our corpus of advanced French IL is based on the fact that thesevariables encompass the working of the whole model as described byLevelt (1989) and Pienemann (1998). The nature of these variables isvery different but they were shown to be highly interrelated (Dewaele1999). We will, more specifically, address the following five researchquestions:

1. Do determiners or adjectives best reflect the learner's knowledge ofgender for a particular noun? Dewaele & VeÂronique (to appear) foundthat gender agreement is more often correct in determiners than inadjectives. This finding would be reinforced if we were to find highercorrelations between gender accuracy rates for determiners (ratherthan adjectives) and that of the various linguistic variables.

2. Are gender agreement errors in modifiers caused by the problems atthe level of diacritical information exchange? If that were thecase, one would expect similar problems for number and person




agreement. An absence of correlation between these different typesof agreement errors would suggest that agreement errors inadvanced ILs are no longer caused by problems at the level ofdiacritical information exchange.

3. Are gender agreement errors linked to processing problems?Uncertainty about the gender of a noun might force the speaker toslow his production down and allocate extra resources to solve theproblem (Towell et al. 1996). This increased monitoring could bereflected in lower speech rates, an increase in filled pauses and inshorter utterances.

4. Is the mastery of gender agreement related to the size of thelearner's actively used vocabulary? More advanced learners could beexpected to have a larger vocabulary but could that lead to higheraccuracy in gender agreement? These advanced learners could havedeveloped a large number of rules of thumb (Carroll 1989) orphonological gender rules (Koehn 1994) allowing them to make lessgender errors.

5. Is the decrease in the number of gender errors linked to the learner'scapacity to produce more implicit speech (Dewaele 1993a, 1995a)?One could expect a significant correlation between these twoindicators of IL development.

5. Methodology

5.1. Participants

Twenty-seven university students, 8 female and 19 male, aged between 18and 21, participated in the experiment. They had taken French at a highschool level (3 to 5 hours a week) for 6 to 8 years. Their interlanguagecould be described as `advanced' (Bartning 1997). The subjects wereadministered a sociobiographical questionnaire.

5.2. Linguistic material

Conversations were recorded with the 27 subjects in a stressful and aneutral situation. The stressful situation consisted of an oral exam ofabout ten minutes that aimed at evaluating the learners' proficiency in thetarget-language. Topics were politics, economics and the subjects' per-formance for other exams. In all 5 hours of speech (17,613 words) wererecorded. The neutral situation involved conversations between the sameresearcher and subjects in a relaxed atmosphere. There was no time-restriction. Topics covered studies, hobbies, politics. In all 15 hours ofspeech (35,021 words) were recorded. The recordings were transcribed bythe researcher into orthographical French. These transcriptions werethen coded at the word level according to their grammatical nature and




possible lexical or morphological errors. We singled out 519 gender errorsout of 9378 modifiers.

We reported earlier that the identification of gender errors is notalways easy in French as some adjectives share the same form for themasculine and the feminine. In these cases we did not count the form as agender error even though it probably was. This means that the totalnumber of gender errors for adjectives in our corpus is probably higher.The following utterance illustrates the problem:

(1) Richard Informal 1132. Acheter un teÂleÂ, une, un auto treÁs cher(e),mais lentement je veux consumer les dix millions.3

`To buy a television, a (fem.), a (masc.) very expensive (masc. orfem.) car, but I want to spend the ten millions very slowly.'

The speaker clearly hesitates about the gender of `auto', first using thecorrect feminine indefinite article, followed by a pause and then using theincorrect masculine indefinite, the noun, an adverb and then an adjectivewhere the gender difference is inaudible.

6. Analysis

We will now examine the accuracy rates (percentage of target-like usage)for gender agreement and their relations to the other morphosyntacticand lexical variables. Dewaele & VeÂronique (to appear) assumed that themost advanced learners had a greater automatisation of the linguisticknowledge which allowed them to spend less time on the retrieval ofgender information. It is therefore highly probable that accuracy rates forgender agreement will correlate with temporal variables as these reflectthe smooth running of the learner's speech production process.

6.1. Proportion of other types of agreement errors

Six types of morphological and four types of lexical errors were calculatedin Dewaele (1993a, 1994) as well as the variation in morpholexicalaccuracy rates for all word classes as well as the variation in proportionsof particular error types across word classes. The present analysisconcentrates on the three types of morphological errors involving agree-ment: gender agreement, number agreement and person agreement inverbs. We checked to see whether the proportion of gender agreementerrors is linked to the two other types of agreement errors. This turnedout not to be the case: the correlation with the proportion of numberagreement errors was entirely non-significant in the informal situation(r � ÿ:13, ns.) and the formal situation (r � ÿ:02, ns); the correlation



3 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.


with the proportion of person agreement errors in finite verbs wasnegative without reaching statistical significance in the informal situation(r � ÿ:36, p < :07) and was close to zero in the formal situation(r � :01, ns).

6.2. Speech rates

The speech rate gives us a global idea of the efficiency of the speechproduction process (Levelt 1989). Higher speech rates suggest a higherdegree of automaticity in the speech production, lower speech rates on theother hand can be an indication of more controlled processing, requiringspeakers to pay attention to the processing while it is happening (Towellet al. 1996, Dewaele 1998a). These controlled processes are tightlycapacity-limited.

A Pearson correlation revealed a strong positive correlation betweenaccuracy rates for gender agreement of determiners and speech rate, in theinformal situation (r � :74, p < :0001) as well as in the formal situation(r � :47, p < :015). A slightly weaker but still significant correlation wasfound between speech rate and accuracy rates for gender agreement ofadjectives in the formal situation (r � :46, p < :02) but the correlationwas non-significant in the informal situation (r � :24, ns). These resultssuggest that fluent speakers make fewer gender errors.

6.3. Hesitation phenomena

Hesitations, often followed by editing expressions such as `er', aregenerally interpreted as evidence of cognitive activity. The `er' mayserve to signal to the addressee that there is trouble and that the sourceof the trouble is still actual (Levelt 1989:484). These editing expressionsare especially common in L2 production after errors or before lexical gaps(Dewaele 1996b). They can, however, also be a sign that the incrementalprocessing is breaking down (Levelt 1989).

The proportion of filled pauses correlated negatively with accuracyrates for gender agreement of determiners in the informal situation(r � ÿ:57, p < :002) and in the formal situation (r � ÿ:55, p < :003). A



Table 4: Correlations between the proportion of gender agreement errorsand other types of agreement errors

Variable Informal Situation Formal Situation

number agreement ÿ.13 ÿ.02

person agreement ÿ.36 .01

* p < :05


similar correlation appeared between the proportion of filled pausesand gender agreement of adjectives in the formal situation (r � ÿ:48,p < :02), but the difference was non-significant in the informal situation(r � ÿ:10, ns). This suggests that a higher proportion of filled pauses islinked to lower accuracy rates for gender agreement.

6.4. Length of utterance

Mean length of utterance can provide an interesting insight in thelearners' capacity to build complex structures in their interlanguage andis often considered as another measure of fluency (Dewaele 1995b). It alsoreflects the development of the IL (Towell et al. 1996:112). We used aformula based on the mean length of the three longest utterances in aspeech extract (MLU3).

A non-significant negative Pearson correlation emerges between theMLU3 scores and accuracy rates for gender agreement in determinersin the informal situation (r � ÿ:36, p < :07) which becomes positiveand significant in the formal situation (r � :46, p < :02). Accuracy ratesfor gender agreement in adjectives did not correlate with MLU3 scoresin the informal situation (r � ÿ:06, ns) nor in the formal situation(r � :15, ns). This suggests that speakers who produce their longestutterances in the informal situation make more gender errors indeterminers while those who produce their longest utterances in theformal situation make fewer gender errors in determiners. This could beinterpreted as a sign that the learners producing their longest utterancein the informal situation are not the same as the ones producing theirlongest utterances in the formal situation. A similar conclusion wasreached in an earlier study where it appeared that more introvertspeakers produce their longest utterances in the informal situation butnot in the formal situation (Dewaele 1999).

6.5. Lexical richness

Dewaele (1993b) found significant negative correlations between lexicalrichness scores and measures of fluency in the formal situation. Whenmore cognitive resources are diverted to lexical searching, the speechproduction slows down. Is there a link however between the size oflearners' active vocabulary and their knowledge of morphological infor-mation of the lemmata?

A Pearson correlation suggests that this is partly true but that it variesaccording to the situation. Lexical richness scores correlated positivelywith accuracy rates for gender agreement in determiners in the informalsituation (r � :37, p < :06) but not in the formal situation (r � ÿ:19, ns).Accuracy rates for gender 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).

6.6. 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 preposi-

tions obtained strong negative loadings on this factor, as opposed to the

pronouns, 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, he/she relies as little as possible on the

spatio-temporal context shared 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 � :48, p < :02) and non-significant negative relations in the

formal situation (r � ÿ: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 � ÿ: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.




7. 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 determiners are very different

in advanced ILs,4 the former being significantly lower (Dewaele &

VeÂronique to appear, Bartning this volume). It thus seems that determi-

ners 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 morpho-

phonological 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



4 Bartning (this volume) found that pre-advanced learners had lower accuracy rates fordeterminers than for adjectives.

Table 6: Correlations between accuracy in gender agreement foradjectives and different linguistic variables in the informal and formalsituations


Speech rates .24 .46*

Proportion of filled pauses ÿ.10 ÿ.48*

Lexical richness .06 .11

MLU3 ÿ.06 .15

Implicit speech-style .28 ÿ.29

Table 5: Correlations between accuracy in gender agreement fordeterminers and different linguistic variables in the informal and formalsituations


Speech rates .74*** .47*

Proportion of filled pauses ÿ.57** ÿ.55**

Lexical richness .37 ÿ.19

MLU3 ÿ.35 .46*

Implicit speech-style .48* ÿ.28

* p < :05, ** p < :01, *** p < :001


with the specification (� feminine). Meisel (personal communication)suggests that learners associate a particular determiner with any newnoun they acquire. Hence the increased likelihood of the correct deter-miner being produced with any noun, contrary to adjectives whose linkwith nouns is much weaker.

The lack of significant correlations between gender errors and othertypes of agreement errors suggests that the errors in advanced II, do notoccur because of a deficient exchange of diacritical information. Gendererrors seemed rather linked to processing problems. Indeed, lower genderaccuracy was correlated to speech rates, filled pauses and utterancelength. Speakers with a poorer knowledge of the gender of nouns mightmonitor this problem more intensely and more often, hence creating anadverse effect on their fluency. This reinforces the view expressed inDewaele & VeÂronique (to appear) that gender errors can have manydifferent causes and do not necessarily reflect agreement problems.

The link between mastery of gender agreement and lexical richness wasfound to be situation-dependent and/or discourse domain-dependent. It ispositive in the informal situation but disappears in the formal situation.One possible explanation is that speakers may have speedy access to thegender for words belonging to discourse domains they are more familiarwith, but that this process is slower and more prone to errors once theconversation covers less familiar discourse domains as was the case in theformal situation. These advanced learners could indeed have developed alarger number of rules of thumb (Carroll 1989) or phonological genderrules (Koehn 1994) allowing them to make less gender errors, but thestress of the formal situation might impair their application.

The final research question was concerned with the link between gendererrors and style-choice. The relation turned out to be situation-dependenttoo. Speakers who make fewer gender errors choose more implicit speech-styles in the informal situation, which can be interpreted as a sign ofconfidence and of a more developed IL. The link disappears in the formalsituation. Possible reasons for this are less familiar discourse domains andthe stress of the exam situation which strongly affects the performance ofmore introverted speakers (Dewaele 1999).

8. Conclusion

We analysed the link between accuracy rates for gender agreement andmorpholexical variables, indicators of fluency, lexical richness and utter-ance length in order to gain a better view of the link between differentsubsystems in the IL. The analyses allow us to draw the following portraitof the learners who make fewer gender errors: they are fluent, confidentenough in the informal situation to use implicit styles. This suggests thatfor these speakers lemma selection and retrieval of diacritic informationconcerning 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 thatthe 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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Jean-Marc Dewaele,School for Languages, Literature and Culture,

Birkbeck College, University of London,43 Gordon Square,

London WC1H 0PD.email: [email protected]

Daniel VeÂronique,UFR Didactique du FrancËais langue eÂtrangeÁre,

Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Received September 28, 1999Accepted January 20, 2000



Relating gender errors to morphosyntax and lexicon in advanced French interlanguage

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