The processing of Determiner – Noun agreement and the identification of the gender of Nouns in the early acquisition of Portuguese

Letícia Corrêa,Maria Cristina Name

doi:10.5334/jpl.34

Letícia Corrêa, Maria Cristina Name

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.34

Copy DOI

Abstract

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.

Highlights

This paper is concerned with an aspect of the acquisition of the Portuguese gender system, namely, the identification of the value of the gender feature of Nouns – a basic condition for gender agreement to take place in language production.Gender can be regarded as a universal lexical feature that characterizes classes of Nouns in the language (Chomsky, 1995)
The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence for children’s early ability to process gender agreement and a theoretical account of the early acquisition of the Portuguese gender system, in which a signal processing treatment to the acquisition process is reconciled with a generative model of language
Additional paired comparisons of the conditions revealed that the difference between congruent determiner (CONG) and incongruent Determiner (INCONG) was significant (t=3.28 df13, p< 0.01) as it was the difference between the INCONG and pseudo functional item (PS) (t=2.22 df13, p= 0.04)

Summary

Introduction

This paper is concerned with an aspect of the acquisition of the Portuguese gender system, namely, the identification of the value of the gender feature of Nouns – a basic condition for gender agreement to take place in language production.Gender can be regarded as a universal lexical feature that characterizes classes of Nouns in the language (Chomsky, 1995). Gender classes do not necessarily have a semantic counterpart Romance languages make it clear that the notion of interpretability must have a language internal meaning as far as gender is concerned. In these languages, there are only two possible values for the gender feature to assume – masculine and feminine. As far as [-animate] Nouns are concerned, the value of the gender feature is always invariant or intrinsic Their ascription to a particular gender class – either masculine or feminine – looks, completely arbitrary. Interpretability, in this case, is exclusively related to the possibility of an element from the lexicon controlling agreement – the interpretable element being the one controlling agreement

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion