The acquisition of grammatical gender in L1 bilingual Spanish

Abstract

We analyze the emergence of grammatical gender in the spontaneous longitudinal Spanish production of a set of Spanish/English bilingual twins from the FerFuLice corpus (Fernandez Fuertes & Liceras, 2009). We take as a point of departure theoretical accounts on gender assignment and gender concord and previous empirical work on the acquisition of gender by monolinguals and bilinguals. Our study deals with how gender incorporates in the case of L1 Spanish bilinguals; how concord within the determiner phrase (DP) operates; and how monolingual and bilingual Spanish pattern in the same way in this respect. We conclude that DP syntax and the gender concord valuation mechanism are in place from very early stages and that morphology and semantics are not determinant factors in this process.