Abstract

AbstractPrevious research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent gender systems such as Russian. However, it is not clear to what extent children are sensitive to the assignment cues and to what extent they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do not know if bilingual children are different from monolingual children in this respect. This article reports on a study investigating bilingual children’s sensitivity to gender assignment cues in Russian. A group of 64 bilingual German–Russian children living in Germany participated in the study, as well as 107 monolingual controls in Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real and nonce words, as well as noun phrases with mismatched cues (where the morphophonological shape of the noun cued one gender and the agreement on the modifying adjective another). The results show that both bilinguals and monolinguals are highly sensitive to cues, both to the frequent transparent cues and to more fine-grained gender regularities in situations where there is ambiguity. There is also an age effect, showing that younger children pay more attention to the cue on the noun itself, thus displaying a preference for regular patterns, while older children are more sensitive to gender agreement on other targets.

Highlights

  • In this paper, we investigate monolingual and bilingual children’s sensitivity to microvariation in the input, to morphophonological cues for grammatical gender assignment in Russian

  • Ambiguous masculine/feminine: -C’ Nominative singular is not a reliable predictor of gender for a subset of nouns ending in a palatalized consonant ( -C’)

  • The results of the analysis indicate that both groups perform more target-like on the Real word than the Nonce word task, both groups become more target-like with age, and for both groups, Masculine is significantly easier than Feminine, while Neuter is significantly more challenging than Feminine

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Summary

Introduction

We investigate monolingual and bilingual children’s sensitivity to microvariation in the input, to morphophonological cues for grammatical gender assignment in Russian. The study is framed within the micro-cue model of language acquisition (Westergaard, 2009a, b, 2014), which argues that children are sensitive to fine-grained linguistic distinctions from early. This has been attested in work on L1 acquisition, including research on grammatical gender in Russian (Rodina, 2008; Rodina & Westergaard, 2012) It remains an open question whether this sensitivity may be found in bilingual contexts. The model argues that children are highly sensitive to variation in the input, paying attention to fine-grained linguistic distinctions from early on. This means that children do not learn by setting (macro-) parameters, as has been assumed in traditional generative literature. The important aspect of the micro-cue model is that children’s generalizations are small, not affecting major categories (e.g., all verbs or all nouns), but take place across a small class or subcategory (one micro-cue at a time)

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