hello, i don't want to hurt the eyes of any professional linguists here, but i'm curious. today i was talking about something in French and i used the article "la". I didn't really know why (since it was an acronym and I didn't know the individual words so I didn't really have any clues). I couldn't remember ever trying to learn the gender or why I used "la", but nonetheless it seemed correct to me to say "la".
That got me googling about L2 acquisition of gender, since also noticed my gender agreement while speaking has been improving recently (I'm a native English speaker). That's where I found out about 2 theories of L2 acquisition of grammatical gender agreement. There are apparently two prevailing hypotheses about this, and here I'm getting most of my information from this paper http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~csisso/docs/honoursThesis.pdf (I don't know why it says la bonne livre is the good book in the introduction haha but nevermind). the first (FFFH, failed functional feature hypothesis) postulates that adult L2 learners can only acquire grammatical gender agreement if they have grammatical gender in their L1. the other hypothesis holds that all L2 learners can internalise grammatical gender agreement.
No one can hope to give an answer to this question here based on their personal experience, but I am interested in knowing what people's experiences are with acquiring gender (or even any other systemic features like case). especially because, when i read or hear incorrect gender or agreement it seems wrong to me, but i'm not sure if that's because i am acquiring gender, since i have no idea what it feels like to speak a gendered language natively.
also if you are a professional linguist I'd be interested to know if you endorse a particular view on this or not !
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