More on L-2 acquisition of gender

[Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

>Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 08:46:20 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "Dan I. SLOBIN" <slobin at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU>
>To: Annette Karmiloff-Smith <a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk>
>Subject: Re: L-2 acquisition of gender
>MIME-Version: 1.0


               I've thought about gender and other L2 problems on and off,
>though have no references for you.  But more anecdotes, for what they're
>worth:
>	I learned German quickly and effortlessly as a 14-year-old
>gymnasium student in Vienna, during my father's Fulbright year there.
>I've read and spoken German a lot in the almost 40 years since then--and
>gender is still problematic.  What amazes me is that it is problematic
>even for some high-frequency, very common words.  Apparently it is
>possible for a adolescent/adult L2 learner/user to encounter words
>thousands and thousands of time, process them quickly and easily in
>comprehension, and never keep track of gender.  For some words I
>oscillate between two genders, but for others even find all three genders
>possible.  In this regard, it might be interesting that various Yiddish
>dialects have reduced the three German genders to two, as have Dutch and
>Scandinavian (and there's certainly research on that).
>	My general opinion is that L2 mastery is hampered by distinctions
>that aren't routinely made in L1. This is certainly true of English
>articles for L1 speakers of Russian and Turkish, in my experience.  I have
>colleagues who are exquisitely fluent English-speakers, but who still
>haven't solved the mysteries of a/the.  Interestingly, this is evident
>only in their writing.  When I listen to them, I hardly ever notice the
>problems with articles.  This must have something to do with the problems
>that they have in acquisition, since comprehension almost always proceeds
>easily without attention to "a" vs. "the" (similarly for comprehending
>German).
>	Another obvious candidate is tense/aspect.  Wolfgang Klein, for
>example, has written what I consider to be the definite analysis of the
>present perfect in English--yet he makes the usual German-speaker's
>errors in use of that form in his spoken English.  Nini, too, hasn't
>figured out the present perfect in her generally fluent English.  Again,
>this is a form that can most often be ignored in comprehension. (And I
>have similar problems with tense/aspect systems in Russian and Spanish.)
>	But I think that word-order variation for the pragmatics of
>topic/focus, given/new, etc., seems to be readily accessible to
>L2-learners.  I think I have a good feel for how to manipulate word order
>in Turkish, Russian, and Spanish--and the patterns are different in those
>three languages.  But this is not something that one would notice in L2
>English, of course, given our limited use of word-order variation.
>	I've discussed these issues as "first-language thinking in
>second-language speaking" in my paper in the Gumperz & Levinson volume,
>_Rethinking linguistic relativity_ (CUP 1996).
>
>Let me

_______________________________________
Professor A.Karmiloff-Smith,
Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit,
Institute of Child Health,
30 Guilford Street,
London WC1N 1EH, U.K.
tel: 0207 905 2754
fax: 0207 242 7717
_______________________________________