Gender agreement in L2 French pre-advanced vs advanced learners

In the analysis of 1352 forms of gender agreement on determiners and adject ive sin L2 learners of French, it was found that gender on the definite det erminer is acquired before the indefinite determiner, and the masculine bef ore the feminine. This study focuses on two levels of learners, advanced an d preadvanced. For the advanced learners the difference in gender acquisiti on for definite and indefinite determiners is significant, but for the prea dvanced learners gender agreement appears randomly, particularly with the i ndefinite determiner un/une. The advanced learners' accuracy rate for agree ment adjectives was not found to be higher for attributive than for predica tive adjectives. On the contrary, agreement in anteposition is the most dif ficult at this level. When Pienemann's processability hierarchy is extended to the mastery and automatization of adjectival agreement, the results cle arly indicate that it is the inflection of feminine forms that causes more problems for learners than the exchange of grammatical information across c lause boundaries. The difficulties learners have with the morphological for m seem to be more predictable and systematic than the difficulties caused b y syntactic complexity.