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

Abstract

According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4-to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender attribution choices on natural gender, they did not base them on phonology either: the masculine was the dominant choice. These results thus provide additional support to the 'masculine as default' view of French nouns' gender acquisition proposed by the authors in an earlier study. The present article considers how the developmental conditions of children's initial computations might bias their tallies towards a higher type frequency for masculine nouns, which could contribute to launching this gender as the default.

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.…”

“…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.…”

“… 13 Boloh and Ibernon (2013) also criticize Karmiloff-Smith's study and report that they were unable to replicate her findings. …”

English Speakers’ Implicit Gender Concepts Influence Their Processing of French Grammatical Gender: Evidence for Semantically Mediated Cross-Linguistic Influence

“…To be sensitive to that similarity, children must have developed an abstract representation of a passive construction (Nicoladis and Sajeev, 2020). Another study found that children who spoke a highly inflected L1 acquired inflections in L2 English faster than children who spoke an L1 with few inflections (Blom et al, 2012). Children can only benefit from the existence of inflections in L1 when learning L2 English if they have some abstract representation of inflections.…”

Acquiring an opaque gender system in Irish, an endangered indigenous language

“…Aspects of morphosyntax present particular challenges in some languages, with studies by Rodina and Westergaard (2013), Boloh and Ibernon (2013) and Blom, Polisenska, and Weerman (2008) demonstrating a protracted trajectory of acquisition of grammatical gender in Norwegian, French and Dutch respectively. Rodina and Westergaard (2013) showed evidence of considerable delay in the acquisition of gender agreement in Norwegian, a language with an opaque grammatical gender system.…”