The development of gender assignment and agreement in English-Greek and German-Greek bilingual children

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this experimental study is to examine the development of Greek gender in bilingual English-Greek and German-Greek children. Four gender production tasks were designed, two targeting gender assignment eliciting determiners and two targeting gender agreement eliciting predicate adjectives for real and novel nouns. Participant performance was assessed in relation to whether the ‘other’ language was a gender language or not (English vs. German) along with the role of the bilinguals’ Greek vocabulary knowledge and language input. The results are argued to contribute significantly to disentangling the role of crosslinguistic influence in gender assignment and agreement by bringing together a variety of input measures such as early and current amount of exposure to Greek, the role of area of residence (i.e. whether Greek is the minority or the majority language), the effect of maternal education and the amount of exposure to Greek in a school setting.