Cross-linguistic influences in the acquisition of grammatical gender? (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Lingua, 2008
In this paper we analyze spontaneous and experimental data involving code-mixed DPs made up of English Determiners + Spanish Nouns (the casa ''house'') and Spanish Determiners + English Nouns (la [the/feminine] house) from child English/Spanish simultaneous bilinguals and from L1 speakers of English, French and Spanish with different levels of proficiency in their respective L2s (Spanish in the case of L1 English and French; English in the case of L1 Spanish). We show that early child bilinguals and adult simultaneous bilinguals (production data) and L1 speakers of Spanish (experimental data) favor mixings where Spanish provides the functional category, the Determiner, over mixings where English does. We also show that when confronted with these mixed DPs adult L1 Spanish speakers and non-native speakers share a preference for the English D followed by a preference for the default gender marking in Spanish, the masculine (el [the/masculine] house). In the case of the L1 Spanish speakers, this preference is overridden by the ''analogical criterion'', (la [the/feminine] house), which consists of assigning the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent (''casa'' is feminine) to the English Noun. We provide a linguistic account of www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Lingua 118 (2008) 827-851 § The general issues that we discuss here are related to the joint research program on language development and these preferences based on the intrinsic Gender feature of the Spanish Noun and the intrinsic Gender Agreement feature or the Spanish Determiner and argue that the cognitive mechanisms employed by the bilingual, the Spanish L1 speaker and the Spanish L2 speaker in spontaneous production and in the grammaticality judgments task make different use of these linguistic units. #
This article presents a corpus study of the acquisition of grammatical gender in Norwegian in two monolingual and two bilingual Norwegian-English children. Gender in Norwegian is expressed as agreement between the noun and other targets such as determiners and adjectives, while definiteness and plurality are expressed as suffixes on the noun itself, i.e. as part of the declension. Furthermore, the gender system is characterized by relatively opaque gender assignment, suggesting that there may be a delay in the acquisition process compared to languages with more transparent systems. Our results show that, while the acquisition of suffixed forms is unproblematic, the children experience considerable problems with gender agreement. Moreover, there is generally no qualitative difference between the monolingual and bilingual children. These findings are discussed in relation to a number of issues: gender vs. declension class, the role of frequency, knowledge of the concept of gender, and monolingual vs. bilingual acquisition.
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...
2016
The acquisition of grammatical gender by multilingual pre-school children (aged six) was investigated by observing their narration and discourse. It emerged that only three of the 17 children actually used gender to classify nouns. Grammatical agreement is acknowledged as a key feature of gender acquisition, and it reflects developmental steps. Children growing up with mostly bilingual German input at a low proficiency level had the greatest difficulties in acquiring gender and agreement in the group investigated.
Languages
This paper aims to demonstrate the reliability of morphosyntactic versus morphophonological features in the acquisition of L2 gender of inanimate nouns across languages. Based on Anna Kibort study “Towards a typology of grammatical features”(2010), the current research proposes that the presence of a gendered determiner is more reliable than gendered noun-final morphemes in the process of adjective agreement within the Determiner Phrase (DP) across two gender transparency system languages. To test this hypothesis, the current research compares English second-language (L2) learners of Hebrew and Spanish. Both languages have a binary gender system for nouns; however, Hebrew lacks a determiner with gender value, but provides a plural ending morpheme that encodes both number and gender. In contrast, Spanish has a gendered article that facilitates gender acquisition, but lacks a plural ending morpheme that indicates gender. Thirty-two L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and thirty-two L1 Engl...
Glossa, 2022
We investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender marking in German by monolingual children as well as German-Russian bilingual children who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask to what extent monolingual and bilingual children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender, and to what extent they rely on lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed three experiments. Experiment 1 tests gender assignment with real nouns; Experiment 2 tests gender assignment to nonce nouns with the same set of noun-internal phonological cues as in Experiment 1, and in Experiment 3 we compare gender assignment to nonce nouns based on phonological vs. structural (agreement) cues when both types of cues are provided. Results show that children are significantly less successful when assigning gender to nonce nouns as compared to real nouns, which highlights the importance of lexical learning. At the same, we observe sensitivity to noun-internal phonological cues for both mono-and bilingual children. Bilingual children show similar patterns as monolingual children but different default strategies. For the bilingual children, we discuss the possibility of cue transfer from Russian to German. Finally, we observe that the role of structural (agreement) cues increases with age, while the role of noun-internal phonological cues decreases with age for the bilingual children, in line with previous findings from other languages.
Grammatical Gender Acquisition of Spanish L3 by Turkish L1
This study analyses the gender acquisition in adult Turkish L1 learners of L3 Spanish. The aim is to focus on their learning process and analyse the difficulties when acquiring grammatical gender. 31 Turkish L1 undergraduate students of L3 Spanish completed one questionnaire in which they had to identify the correct grammatical gender of 37 Spanish nouns. In this list were included rule-based endings, exceptions and nouns with common gender. The results demonstrate that, even though the students Turkish L1 learners here exhibit a lack of language gender transfer from Turkish, they were capable of learning the most general rule which consists of nouns ending in o are masculines and nouns ending in a are feminine. However they could not accomplish the same with other rule-based noun endings and exceptions to all rules. In this study the implications of these findings together with other research and experiments previously conducted for gender acquisition in other languages with gender such as Romanian are discussed and analysed.
The acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 German by learners
2016
In recent years there has been an increase in research on the acquisition of morphological aspects of a second language (L2). Specifically, a number of studies have been conducted on the acquisition of grammatical gender in the L2. The study reported in this paper investigated the adult L2 acquisition of grammatical gender in German by first language (L1) speakers of Afrikaans, English and Italian, respectively. The aim of the study was to determine how similarities and differences between the L1 and L2 in terms of grammatical gender affect the acquisition of this aspect of the target L2. Two experimental tasks – a picture naming task and a sentence completion task – were designed to determine to what extent the grammatical gender of nouns is accurately reflected on determiners and adjectives. Throughout, the L1 Italian group outperformed the other two groups. Since Italian (like German) expresses grammatical gender on determiners and nouns, while neither English nor Afrikaans does,...