Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children

Abstract

This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =>FEM gender, male referent =>MASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a ending =>FEM, -o ending =>MASC, others =>MASC or FEM) to assign gender to pseudowords/novel words; and whether bilinguals’ language dominance (Spanish strong/weak) has an effect. Data were collected from 49 5- to 6-year-old Spanish-speaking children—28 monolingual L1 Spanish (L1Sp) and 21 Basque-dominant (L1 Basque-L2 Spanish) bilinguals (BDB). Results reveal a general preference for MASC gender across conditions, especially in BDB children, who produced masculine modifiers for 83% of items, while the L1Sp children did so for only 63% of items. Regression analyses show that for both groups, morphological cues have more weight than the nature of the referent in participants’ assignment of gender to novel words, and that the L1Sp group is more attentive to FEM morphological markers than the BDB group, pointing towards the existence of differences in the strength of cue-patterns for gender marking.

A review on grammatical gender acquisition in monolingual Spanish-speaking children

“…Martínez-Nieto (2018) provided evidence for overgeneralization of masculine forms of articles and clitics, as well as a higher accuracy level in masculine forms use in normally developing monolingual Spanish-speaking children and young heritage speakers. A recent study using pseudowords with Spanish monolinguals and Basque-Spanish bilinguals revealed a general preference for masculine gender for both groups (Pérez-Tattam et al, 2019). Similar to Pérez-Pereira (1991a), the authors of this study found that morphophonological cues play a more important role than the biological sex of the referent.…”

Gender assignment strategies and L1 effects in the elicited production of mixed Spanish-Basque DPs

“…An extensive literature on unilingual Spanish production by L2 bilinguals and heritage Spanish speakers (see Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán, 2008, a.o. ), and by children with Spanish as L1 and L2 (Pérez-Pereira, 2009;Pérez-Tattam, Ezeizabarrena, Stadthagen-González, & Mueller Gathercole, 2019) also supports the masculine default option. Interestingly, the high variability observed across L1 Spanish speakers in the production and in the acceptance rates of the M/F prenominal modifiers of hermaphroditic Spanish nouns has led some researchers to question the inherent lexical gender feature (Eddington & Hualde, 2008).…”

La sensibilidad a las claves lingüísticas y el uso del género gramatical en español: un estudio con niños diagnosticados con Trastorno Evolutivo del Lenguaje

“…En términos generales, los resultados hallados en este estudio para los niños con desarrollo típico coinciden con los estudios previos tanto en español como en otras lenguas romances. En concreto, se observa que los niños utilizan el género masculino significativamente mejor que el femenino (Anderson y Lockowitz, 2009;Boloh e Ibernon, 2010;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979;Pérez-Pereira, 1991;Pérez-Tattam et al, 2019).…”