An interesting post over at Language Log discusses how, apparently, native speakers of French, intended to serve as a control group in a second-language acquisition experiment, were remarkably inconsistent in the genders they assigned to nouns. This is important because native speakers are generally assumed to be fairly consistent and correct in their use of the language and it is this usage, alongside written grammars, that is therefore used to measure the success of non-native speakers' language acquisition.

Ayoun was investigating second-language learning of grammatical gender in French -- a major difficulty for learners from non-gender languages like English. She had constructed a couple of tasks: grammaticality judgments of sentences where there was a gender agreement mismatch, and a gender-assignment task, where subjects were given a noun and had to choose among "masculine", "feminine", "both", or "I don't know".

In both tasks, to her great surprise, she found a great deal of disagreement among her native-speaker controls! In these tasks, there is always a normatively 'correct' answer -- French dictionaries and textbooks all agree on what the genders of nouns are, and how gender agreement in sentences should turn out -- in the same way they agree on how to form relative clauses, and how to form passives, and where to put clitic pronouns, and so on. Native speakers would be expected to perform close to ceiling on this grammatical task, as on others. But, surprisingly, they don't.

What is interesting is that the greatest variation existed among the youngest participants.

On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers' native-language abilities are identical to adults' abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, 'target'. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Apparently, no systematic study of native French speakers' assignment of grammatical gender has been done for about 30 years, so we don't know when or how this inconsistency developed. It's interesting though, because it makes me wonder whether it has anything to do with the increasing amount of 'noise' being overlaid on language. Teachers and all manner of pedants have been bewailing the deterioration of language quite possibly since we started using language in the first place. What I find odd though is not just the change in the way people use language, but the fact that they don't really seem to 'have the idiom', as it were. I hope that's not just me turning into a stuffy old lecturer before my time and ranting about 'kids these days' - I'm particular about usage, certainly, but I try not to smother living language.

As the post points out, the experiment was not set up to provide answers to questions regarding the variation between native language speakers so we'll have to wait for another study before we can do more than wonder out loud. But in the mean time, I shall happily speculate to my heart's content.