Adquisición del género en lengua francesa por niños españoles

Resumen

Nuestro trabajo es una aportación a los estudios sobre las interferencias que se producen de la lengua materna (LM) a una lengua extranjera (LE) en el transcurso de la adquisición de ésta. Nosotros queremos ver en quégrado influyen las interferencias en una situación concreta y con unos determinados alumnos, tomando como objeto de estudío la categoría gramatical de género. Las pruebas en las que basamos nuestras conclusiones fueron aplicadas a 24 alumnos españoles de 6–7 años, que estudian en un colegio francés desde los 3 años

Podemos decir que cuanto mayor es el conocimiento del francés menor es el número de interferencias. Tenemos que tener en cuenta que, aunque nuestro grupo de alumnos se puso en contacto con una LE a una temprana edad, no posee un bilingüismo perfecto y su LM tiene más peso. Además, como hemos podido comprobar, los errores cometidos en francés no se deben solamente a las interferencias, sino también al desconocimiento de reglas gramaticales, distracciones, etc.

Abstract

This paper deals with interferences from the mother tongue (MT) that take place during the acquisition of a foreign language (FL). We were interested in studying to what extent interferences influence a specific situation in a particular age-group of students. Specifically, the study focussed on the grammatical category gender. 24 6–7 years old Spanish speaking students attending a French school in Spain from the age of 3 years completed the tests. From the results, we can conclude that MT interference is directly related to the student's level of knowledge: i. e., greater knowledge of French, less interference. However, we must underline the fact that although the present group of students were exposed to the FL from an early age, they were not bilingual. Their MT exerted a powerful influence. Nevertheless, interference alone does not account for every error in the FL, there are other factors at work, such as poor knowledge of grammatical rules, absentmindedness, etc.

Extended Summary

Noun gender morphemes present differences in Spanish and French. In both languages noun gender is arbitrary -except for natural gender- which makes its acquisition problematic. But in spite of its arbitrarity, the gender category is very productive and its deficient learning greatly impoverishes the speaker's usage of these languages. In Spanish most occurrences of the gender morpheme are represented by the opposition -o/-a (RAE, 1995), while in French this opposition is represented by -o/ -e (Grevisse, 1980).

Native speakers establish gender differences at a very early age and almost automatically. In Spanish, by the age of three years children have learned to use gender (López Ornat, 1994), and few developmental changes are observed from 4 to 11 years (Pérez, 1990).

The Spanish language test which we administer shows that at 6 years of age children have no problems in gender usage in their MT (mother tongue). This seems to support the theory that from an early age children show intuition for grammar rules (Vygotsky, 1977; Piaget, 1985).

All the items included in the tests refer to asexual nouns, so that informants are only required to pay attention to the linguistic elements which provide information on gender (determiners, suffixes,…). In some instances, the different information of nominal elements seem to show morpho-phonological conflict in the two languages; in others, nouns representing the same referents have different gender in French and Spanish.

Our tests provides students with the nouns in French together with drawings which clarify the referents. They are asked to choose determiners, in a multiple choice drill (le/la, un/une, du/de la/de l'/des), to demonstrate that they have learned gender in French.

The results show that for nouns with different gender in the two languages in some cases no errors are made, while in others errors are frequent (see tables I, II and III, and figures 4 and 5, in the paper). We conclude that no errors are made when they are well-known nouns; errors tend to be linked to less well- known which carry interferences from the MT. Finally, only students who have internalized French grammar rules are able to produce the correct gender form.

Palabras clave:

• Lengua materna
• lengua extranjera
• adquisición
• interferencia
• categoría gramatical de género

Keywords:

• Mother tongue
• foreign language
• acquisition
• interference
• grammatical category gender