A connectionist account of Spanish determiner production Andrew Nix was funded by a University of Hertfordshire Research Studentship. The work was also aided by a British Council travel grant as part of the BritishSpanish Joint Research Programme (Acciones Integradas) 199596. The ordering of the ... (original) (raw)
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A connectionist model of Spanish determiner production
2003
Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues which suggest it is masculine, and more likely to assign masculine gender to nouns with ambiguous cues. In this paper, we investigate the phonological cues available to children and seek to explore the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel items. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner-noun phrases taken from parental speech in [*
A Connectionist account of Spanish determiner production
A Connectionist Network that models the production of simple phonologically coded Spanish Noun Phrases is described. The training data uses type/token frequencies taken directly from a Spanish child's linguistic environment. The training set increases in size in a manner which mirrors the increasing complexity of the real linguistic environment. The results show that the model can learn the task and generalise to unseen Noun Phrase combinations. Moreover the generalisation performance is of a similar nature to that of Spanish children.
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...
Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2003
The early acquisition of the Portuguese gender system is investigated. It is argued that the acquisition of the gender system is based upon the identification of morpho-phonological information within the closed class of determiners and upon the processing of agreement within the DP. Experimental evidence is provided for young children's sensibility to morpho-phonological alterations in the class of determiners and for children's reliance on this sort of information in the identification of the gender of novel nouns. Developmental differences in the effect of a phonology-gender analogy in the processing of gender agreement suggest that the effect of this factor after the age of three is dependent upon the gender system of the language having been identified on the basis of grammatical agreement at an earlier age. A theoretical account is provided in terms of a processing model that incorporates a theory of language in which agreement is characterized as feature sharing.
Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition
Psychological Science, 2007
All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of ''the,'' respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender ( la pelota, ''ball [ feminine]''; la galleta, ''cookie [ feminine]'') or different grammatical gender ( la pelota; el zapato, ''shoe [masculine]''), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, ''Find the ball''). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.
Early Spanish grammatical gender bootstrapping: Learning nouns through adjectives
Developmental Psychology, 2013
Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants were shown variants of 2 unfamiliar objects; one was described as being feminine and the other as being masculine under the form of adjectives that ended either in a or o according to the most common rule of assigning gender in Spanish. Word-image associations were then assessed by presenting the 2 images together and labeling one of them with a masculine novel noun or a feminine novel noun that followed the gender contrast a/o. The data revealed that Spanish-learning children associated the novel words with the appropriate image on the basis of the morphophonological cues embedded in the previously heard adjectives. Learning grammatical gender and number may be complex in a rich morphological system such as Spanish; however, toddlers seem to benefit from the morphophonological consistency and reiteration of the system to infer novel word-object associations.
Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2011
This paper focuses on the role of agreement in the ascription of gender to animate nouns by children acquiring Portuguese. An elicited production task was used in which children were requested to refer to novel objects named by pseudo masculine/feminine nouns. It aimed at verifying the extent to which an agreeing element (the determiner), the noun-ending or a correlation between the gender of the determiner and the noun-ending would guide the ascription of a pseudo-noun to a masculine/feminine gender class. This study extends an earlier one, in which 2-4 year olds acquiring Brazilian Portuguese were shown to rely more on agreement than on correlational patterns, when ascribing gender to pseudo inanimate nouns (Corrêa & Name, 2003). 80 2-4 year olds acquiring Brazilian and European Portuguese were tested. The results suggest that reliance on agreement prevails, though children are sensitive to correlational patterns and the production of feminine DPs (determiner phrases) is particularly hard. It is argued that children rely on an algorithmic procedure for gender identification and that gender markedness in nouns with an optional gender feature increases the demands of DP production.
Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers
Cognitive Development, 1994
We compared the assignment of gender to masculine and feminine pictured objects-as classified by the Spanish grammar-by English-and Spanish-speaking children and adults in three experiments. Across all three studies, subjects participated in one of two conditions. In one condition, pictures alone were presented; in the other condition, pictures were shown and labeled. We found that speakers of Spanish began to classify the objects according to the grammatical gender of the Spanish language in the second grade, unlike speakers of English. The effect of grammatical gender was more pronounced for speakers of Spanish when the objects were labeled, pointing specifically to the role of language in their classifications. We also found that English speakers were consistent in their judgments, often classifying artificial objects as male-like and natural objects as female-like. Spanish speakers were also sensitive to the naturalfemale/artificial-male conceptual division. Finally, we found that the artificialmale/natural-female link was an earlier force in classification for speakers of English than grammatical gender was for speakers of Spanish, suggesting that grammatical classifications are superimposed on conceptual ones in development.
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.