The second language acquisition of grammatical gender and number in Italian

This cross-sectional empirical study tested the ability of Anglophone L2 learners of Italian (n = 87) to assign grammatical gender and number to a subset of isolated nouns drawn from a written corpus of current magazine and newspaper articles. Italian native speakers served as controls (n = 109). We first present a descriptive account of grammatical gender that outlines several idiosyncrasies and complexities than may lead to difficulties for L2 learners, particularly English native speakers, from a Feature Reassembly approach and a Minimalist perspective. We then discuss L2 learnability implications in light of the results of a written, computerized gender assignment task (GAT) showing significant effects for gender and number, ambiguous vs. transparent nouns, but not for suffixed vs non-suffixed nouns.