In order to determine the nature of naturalistic learners’ difficulty with grammatical
gender in a complex morphological system, the longitudinal production data of an early
naturalistic L1- Italian and L1-Turkish learner who are acquiring German are examined
in light of current theories of gender within Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program as
well as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993; Embick & Noyer 2001). After
analyzing the speakers’ marking on determiners, adjectives and pronouns, we conclude
that these learners’ errors in the gender of German nouns are the result of at least four
factors: inadequate lexical learning, processing pressure, mapping difficulty, and parsing
errors that cause the paradigm to be inadequately learned. These factors may be
particularly problematic for learners acquiring a system such as that in German, where
gender marking is conflated with case and number on determiners, adjectives and
pronouns.
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