Children’s Production of Subject–Verb Agreement in Hebrew When Gender and Context are Ambiguous

Abstract

Third and 5th grade Hebrew-speaking children performed two sentence completion tasks, one requiring the assignment of male, female, or gender-ambiguous names and the inflection of verbs for male-stereotyped, female-stereotyped, and gender-neutral activities, and the other task, of inflecting verbs for male- and female-stereotyped activities performed by children with gender-ambiguous names. The question of concern was whether when faced with the need to inflect verbs to match the conceptual gender of the sentence subject, the gender-stereotyped nature of the activities in question and children's own gender would play a role in resolving the dilemma created by gender-ambiguous names and contexts. In both parts of the study, we found that (1) children's own gender played a role in determining the pattern of verb inflection, and (2) children used their semantic knowledge regarding the gender-stereotyped nature of activities to inflect verbs so as to create subject-verb agreement. Hence, subject-verb agreement in children draws on both their grammatical and semantic knowledge.