The comprehension of clitic gender in child heritage and second language Spanish: evidence from a dual language program (original) (raw)
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Gender Acquisition in Bilingual Spanish
2005
Tests with L1 and early L2 learners have indicated that gender assignment and agreement is acquired easily in French and Spanish, which is plausibly guided by the formal properties that distinguish gender-based noun classes in these languages (Karmiloff-Smith 1978, Pérez Pereira 1991, Möhring 2001). Case studies of bilingual French-German and Italian-German children (Müller 1987, Cantone 1999) have shown that these children develop each gender system independently; no clear evidence for transfer has been found. The present study investigates the early emergence of Spanish gender assignment and agreement in the spontaneous speech of bilingual Spanish-German children at the one-word stage and at the beginning of the two-word stage. It will be shown that although the morphosyntactic aspects of gender assignment and agreement are not directly affected, agreement within the DP manifests later in the productions of the bilingual children than in the productions of a monolingual control group. This observation can be related to a delay in certain aspects of prosodic acquisition, whereas the formally less transparent German gender system seems to have no impact on the development of the Spanish agreement system.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2021
We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals (n = 1,774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions (n = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (2nd graders vs. 5th graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000), were collected by Pearson (2002). Results revealed that in Spanish nominal constructions, children across both instructional programs and grade levels evinced native-like acquisition of grammatical gender. In mixed nominals, children overwhelmingly assigned the masculine gender to English nouns. Notably, irrespective of schooling background, simultaneous Spanish/English bilingual children used the masculine default gender strategy when assigning gender to English nouns with feminine translation equivalents. This suggests that from age seven, simultaneous Spanish/English child bilingual acquisition of grammatical gender is characterized by a predisposition towards the employment of the masculine default gender strategy in bilingual speech.
The acquisition of gender: what Spanish children tell us
Journal of Child Language, 1991
ABSTRACTData from an experiment on gender acquisition with 160 Spanish children from four to eleven years of age are presented in this paper. In Spanish there are three possible clues (semantic, morphophonological and syntactic), that speakers can use to determine the gender of a noun and the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. Items where only one of the clues was present, items where there was a combined effect of two of them in agreement (both were feminine or masculine), and items where clues were in conflict (one masculine and the other feminine) were introduced in the experiment. This experimental manipulation made it possible to test the relative strength of the different types of competing clues. In particular, the aim of the present study was to determine the relative importance of intralinguistic and extralinguistic clues, as evidenced by the ability of Spanish children to recognize the gender of a noun upon hearing it in a particular frame, and consequen...
Gender Marking and Clitic Pronoun Resolution in Simultaneous Bilingual Children
Languages
The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed. Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whereas only highly proficient bilingual children achieve target-like performance. Crucially, errors in gender marking are persistent for monolingual and bilingual children even when adult-like production rates are achieved. This study aims to readdress the acquisition of clitics in an innovative way, by entering the variable of gender in an experimental design targeting to assess production and processing by bilingual and monolingual children. Moreover, we examined the role of language proficiency (in terms of general verbal intelligence and syntactic production abilities). The groups had comparable performance in both tasks (in terms of correct responses and error distribution in production and reaction times in comprehension). However, v...
Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children
Languages, 2019
This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =>FEM gender, male referent =>MASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a ending =>FEM,-o ending =>MASC, others =>MASC or FEM) to assign gender to pseudowords/novel words; and whether bilinguals' language dominance (Spanish strong/weak) has an effect. Data were collected from 49 5-to 6-year-old Spanish-speaking children-28 monolingual L1 Spanish (L1 Sp) and 21 Basque-dominant (L1 Basque-L2 Spanish) bilinguals (BDB). Results reveal a general preference for MASC gender across conditions, especially in BDB children, who produced masculine modifiers for 83% of items, while the L1 Sp children did so for only 63% of items. Regression analyses show that for both groups, morphological cues have more weight than the nature of the referent in participants' assignment of gender to novel words, and that the L1 Sp group is more attentive to FEM morphological markers than the BDB group, pointing towards the existence of differences in the strength of cue-patterns for gender marking.
Early language experience facilitates gender processing in Spanish heritage speakers
Proceedings Supplement of the 35th Boston University Conference on Language Development, 2011
Do heritage speakers (HS) have advantages over L2 learners (L2ers) in morphosyntax? Because results of recent studies are mixed, we revisited this question in three spoken word recognition experiments on gender agreement. 23 Spanish native speakers (NS), 29 HS, and 33 proficiency-matched L2ers completed an aural grammaticality judgment task (GJT), an aural gender-monitoring task (GMT), and an oral repetition task (RT). The results of the GJT and the GMT revealed significant grammaticality effects for all groups, suggesting that they all use gender cues in the noun phrase for noun recognition. Noun ending was not significant for the NS, while HS and L2ers were slower and less accurate with non-canonical ending nouns. In the RT, however, NS and HS showed a grammaticality effect while L2ers did not, suggesting that L2ers may not have the same type of implicit knowledge of gender tested by this task. These results confirm that HS have an advantage over L2ers in less metalinguistically explicit tasks and in oral production.
Heritage Language Journal
Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known to affect the acquisition of certain grammatical markers, we examine whether bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate to bilingual contact-induced phonetic variability, namely, reduction in the inventory of word-final unstressed vowels. We analyzed narratives from children in the United States (n = 49, ages 4–12). All NP s (n = 1415) were analyzed for structure, noun class, and morphology. Word-final vowels were sub-selected for acoustic analyses. Morpho-syntactically, group results show high accuracy with gender (95%), but with wide individual variation (44%–100%). Speakers also show individual variability and substantive numbers of vowel misclassifications (6%–33%) with higher variability for /a/ and /o/. We found bilingual effects in both domains but no association between phonetics and gender accuracy. These findings have implic...