oa 'Het' gaat niet vanzelf. De verwerving van het genus door dove volwassenen en horende tweedetaalleerders

This article compares the acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender of Dutch deaf adults to the acquisition of hearing Turkish and Moroccan Arabic adult L2 learners. Written data was analysed, collected through a (semi-)spontaneous production task in which learners were asked to write The Frog Story (Mayer, 1969) on the computer. The results show that all learner groups massively overuse the common determiner de to neuter nouns. The reverse, the use of het with common nouns, hardly ever occurred. Previous research in various L2 populations revealed similar production patterns (cf. Blom, Polišenská, & Weerman, 2008; Hulk & Cornips 2006a,b; Unsworth, 2008). The results showed no qualitative and/or quantitative differences on group level or individual level. In addition, all learners were consistent in the attribution of grammatical gender. On the basis of these results, a theoretical model was built to try to explain the various production patterns.