Swedish grammatical gender is challenging for Finnish-speaking
learners of Swedish due to its abstract meaning, the complex nature of
Swedish NPs and the low salience of the morphology used to mark gender.
Our study compares the expression of gender in texts written in Swedish
by Finnish-speaking 12- and 15-year-old immersion students with that of
16-year-old non-immersion students. The results show that NPs with
gender agreement, i.e. those with several morphemes marking gender, are
more difficult than NPs with only one marker. In all informant groups,
uter is significantly easier than neuter, but uter is also overused, as
approximately 75% of all Swedish nouns are uter in modern Swedish.
Comparisons between different informant groups show that non-immersion
students often reach a significantly higher level of accuracy than
immersion students, which indicates that formal teaching has a positive
effect.