Determiners and noun endings in French children’s gender attribution choices

Abstract

The present study examines the respective roles of determiners and noun endings in four to ten-year-old French children's gender attribution choices. In the context of an elicited production task, participants were introduced with determiner-noun pairs where the gender form of the article and the probabilistic gender value of noun suffixes were discordant. Results showed that suffix-congruent choices were never above chance: they were far below chance in the case of feminine suffixes and either below or at chance in the case of masculine suffixes. Results are discussed with respect to a well-known phonological scenario for French gender acquisition and with respect to the masculine as default strategy recently put forth by Boloh and Ibernon (2010) .

Grammatical gender assignment in French: dispelling the native speaker myth

“…More recent studies by Boloh and his colleagues (Boloh and Ibernon, 2010, 2013; Boloh, Escudier, Royer and Ibernon, 2012) found no evidence that French children or adults use a phonological strategy when selecting a gender-marked determiner for inanimate pseudo-nouns in an elicited production task. When 4- to 10-year-old children performed the same task with incongruent determiner-noun pairs of inanimate pseudo-nouns, they never relied on phonological cues, leading Boloh et al (2012) to conclude that children use the masculine as a default gender, and that the feminine is acquired based on its co-occurrence with feminine determiners. Boloh and Ibernon (2013) administered an oral description task with pseudo-words to children (n=182) of various age groups (from 3;8 to 12;6), adolescents (n=24) and young adults (n=22), and similarly report no evidence of a phonological strategy.…”

Natural gender, phonological cues and the default grammatical gender in French children

“…Suffix-congruent scores for feminine suffixes are also far below those for masculine suffixes when 4-to 10-year-olds are presented with genderdiscordant article-noun pairs, although in both cases the dominant response is to adhere to the provided form of the article (Boloh et al, 2012). Finally, when presented with a contradiction between natural gender and the gender value of nominal endings, children up to age 12 also overwhelmingly supply masculine articles (the current study).…”

“…However, recent production data suggest that this phonological tactic might not be the one French children favour. Boloh and Ibernon (2010) and Boloh, Escudier, Royer, and Ibernon (2012) found little evidence for a viable phonological strategy in the case of nonce nouns bearing feminine endings. Their results further suggested that the masculine might act as the default gender and not merely as the dominant one.…”

“…Critically, scores for feminine suffixes were never at a level high enough to support a viable version of the phonological scenario. Boloh et al (2012) used a similar elicited production task except that 4-to 10-year-old French children were presented with discordant determiner-noun pairs: the gender form of the article and the gender value of nominal endings were opposite. All nonce nouns were inanimate nouns.…”

Grammatical gender attribution, input statistics and the default gender in French children: A reply to Kerkhoff

“…High suffix-based scorers were indeed more numerous among the 4-year-olds than the 7-year-olds in B&I's (2010) experiment 1 but not in experiments 2 and 3. More generally, there was no consistent decrement of suffix-based responses for feminine nouns across the five experiments reported in B&I (2010) and Boloh, Escudier, Royer, and Ibernon (2012).…”