Early Spanish grammatical gender bootstrapping: Learning nouns through adjectives.

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants were shown variants of 2 unfamiliar objects; one was described as being feminine and the other as being masculine under the form of adjectives that ended either in a or o according to the most common rule of assigning gender in Spanish. Word-image associations were then assessed by presenting the 2 images together and labeling one of them with a masculine novel noun or a feminine novel noun that followed the gender contrast a/o. The data revealed that Spanish-learning children associated the novel words with the appropriate image on the basis of the morphophonological cues embedded in the previously heard adjectives. Learning grammatical gender and number may be complex in a rich morphological system such as Spanish; however, toddlers seem to benefit from the morphophonological consistency and reiteration of the system to infer novel word-object associations.

Brown, Smith, Samara, & Wonnacott (pre-print). Semantic cues in language learning: An artificial language study with adult and child learners.

“…Gender may appear arbitrary (Bloomfield 1933;Maratsos, 1982), yet corpus analysis reveals surprising regularities (e.g., Corbett, 1991;Mirković, MacDonald, & Seidenberg, 2005): in Serbian, nouns referring to fruits tend to be feminine, while nouns referring to vegetables tend to be masculine (a semantic regularity); in French, words ending in -ette are more likely to be feminine than masculine (a phonological regularity). Adult native speakers are sensitive to such regularities, as evidenced by their usage of gender markers with novel words (Arias-Trejo & Alva, 2013;Karmiloff-Smith, 1981;Mulford, 1985), and naturally occurring speech errors (Barbaud, Ducharme, & Valois, 1982;Szagun, Stumper, Sondag, & Franik, 2007;Vigliocco, Vinson, Martin, & Garrett, 1999). A key question for language acquisition is whether, and under what circumstances, children also make such generalizations.…”

Looking for Wugs in all the Right Places: Children's Use of Prepositions in Word Learning

“…In sum, this study is the first to show that by 2.5 years of age, children are able to use prepositions to help associate novel words with their intended referents. It adds to a growing literature demonstrating children's resourcefulness when it comes to word-learning and their ability to exploit a variety of morpho-syntactic features to make inferences about the properties of novel words such as plural marking (Jolly & Plunkett, 2008;Paquette-Smith & Johnson, 2016), grammatical gender (Arias-Trejo & Alva, 2013), the number of semantic arguments in an utterance (Fisher et al, 2006;Naigles, 1990;Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012), word order (Gertner, Fisher, & Eisengart, 2006), and, as this study shows, prepositions. Future work will investigate whether even younger children can use prepositions to learn novel words and whether parental reports of children's preposition knowledge at these younger ages also align with children's eye movement behavior.…”

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

“…The child’s primary task would not be to decide on nouns’ gender subclass, but he or she could use their registered knowledge of phonological regularities in relation to natural gender to guess the answer. Analogous (artificial) object-selection tasks could be devised to probe children’s knowledge of nominal endings in the case of inanimate nonce nouns (see Arias-Trejo & Alva, 2012, for such evidence in Spanish-speaking 30-month-olds).…”