Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition

Abstract

All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender, with obligatory gender marking on preceding articles (e.g., la and el, the feminine and masculine forms of "the," respectively). Adult native speakers of languages with grammatical gender exploit this cue in on-line sentence interpretation. In a study investigating the early development of this ability, Spanish-learning children (34-42 months) were tested in an eye-tracking procedure. Presented with pairs of pictures with names of either the same grammatical gender (la pelota, "ball [feminine]"; la galleta, "cookie [feminine]") or different grammatical gender (la pelota; el zapato, "shoe [masculine]"), they heard sentences referring to one picture (Encuentra la pelota, "Find the ball"). The children were faster to orient to the referent on different-gender trials, when the article was potentially informative, than on same-gender trials, when it was not, and this ability was correlated with productive measures of lexical and grammatical competence. Spanish-learning children who can speak only 500 words already use gender-marked articles in establishing reference, a processing advantage characteristic of native Spanish-speaking adults.

Beyond associations: Sensitivity to structure in pre-schoolers’ linguistic predictions

“…But because in these studies the most associated patient was also the most 152 associated word tout court, it remains unclear whether children were simply predicting on the 153 1 Lukyanenko and Fisher also found that 2.5-year-olds were faster to orient to a plural noun when it was heard in an informative context, a result that could also potentially be driven by prediction. However it is also explicable by facilitated integration (see also Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007). Unambiguously predictive effects (i.e., registered before or at noun onset)…”

Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech

“…In one set of analyses, children were grouped by age (18, 24, and 36 months). In a second set of analyses, we compared children who were not yet using determiners in their own speech with those who produced determiners, given recent research showing that children's efficiency in online speech processing is associated with their level of grammatical competence (Fernald, Perfors, & Marchman, 2006;Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007).…”

Eye-Tracking and the Visual World Paradigm

“…Fourth, the topics of interest can be investigated under natural, relatively realistic conditions in which listeners hear words, sentences, or stories that are pragmatically relevant. A last advantage is that this technique can be used for participants of most ages, since it does not require participants to read or carry out complex tasks; it has been used very successfully with preschool children in a number of studies (e.g., Lew-Williams and Fernald 2007).…”

“…Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that the gender anticipation effect can even be found in preschoolers.…”