Phonological vs. natural gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German–Russian)

Abstract

We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues compared to other languages, and children have been argued to acquire semantic and phonological rules in tandem. German–Russian bilingual children face the challenge of acquiring two different gender assignment systems simultaneously. We tested 45 bilingual children (ages 4–10 years) and monolingual controls. Results show that the children are clearly sensitive to phonological cues, while semantic cues play a minor role. However, monolingual and bilingual children have different defaulting strategies, with monolinguals defaulting to neuter and bilinguals to feminine gender.

The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition

“…The Spanish gender system is more complex than just the final vowels. From our perspective, the cues to gender are noun endings and article form (or more broadly, concord patterns, with a central role for bootstrapping from the article).17 Gender systems are abstract and tolerate a fair amount of poverty of the phonological cues (for similar observations, see Kupisch, 2021). Learners can learn gender systems with few overt phonological cues, as in French.…”

“…Similarly, Van Heughten and Johnson (2011) argue that phonological transparency and saliency of French gender leads to an earlier acquisition and earlier use of the gender cue in infant word recognition when compared to Dutch. Kupisch et al (2021) show that phonological cues are as important to bilingual children as to monolinguals.…”

“…Experimental studies about gender in Spanish and beyond often make reference to the transparency of the Spanish gender system (or at least part of it) based on two aspects: 1) the correlation between the final vowels -o/-a found in some nouns, and masculine and feminine gender, respectively; and 2) the extent of this pattern (Kuchenbrant, 2005;Alarcón, 2011;Goebel-Mahrle & Shin, 2020;Cuza & Pérez-Tattam, 2015;Martínez Nieto & Restrepo, 2023, Kupisch et al, 2021. A corollary of this type of approach, espoused in some of the previous works (e.g., explicitly assumed: Alarcón, 2011; tacitly assumed: Kuchenbrant, 2005), is the treatment of -o/-a as gender morphemes.…”

Language balance rather than age of acquisition: A study on the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect in Portuguese–German bilinguals

“…The repercussions that the mismatches between gender systems can have on the acquisition, representation and retrieval of gender in bilinguals have been a focus of interest of many researchers (e.g., Egger et al, 2018;Kupisch et al, 2022;Lemhöfer et al, 2008;Unsworth, 2008, among many others). In the present study, we focused on the representation and processing of grammatical gender in both early and late bilinguals.…”