Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:34:47.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The acquisition of gender: what Spanish children tell us*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Miguel Pérez-Pereira
Miguel Pérez-Pereira*
Affiliation:
University of Santiago
*
Departmento de Psicologia Evolutiva y de la Educación, Facultad de Filosofía, Campus Universitario, 15705 Santiago, Spain
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Data from an experiment on gender acquisition with 160 Spanish children from four to eleven years of age are presented in this paper. In Spanish there are three possible clues (semantic, morphophonological and syntactic), that speakers can use to determine the gender of a noun and the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. Items where only one of the clues was present, items where there was a combined effect of two of them in agreement (both were feminine or masculine), and items where clues were in conflict (one masculine and the other feminine) were introduced in the experiment. This experimental manipulation made it possible to test the relative strength of the different types of competing clues. In particular, the aim of the present study was to determine the relative importance of intralinguistic and extralinguistic clues, as evidenced by the ability of Spanish children to recognize the gender of a noun upon hearing it in a particular frame, and consequently, to establish the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. A procedure similar to that used by Karmiloff-Smith (1979).was employed. The results (which are compared with those obtained in other languages) give support to the theoretical view that children pay far more attention to syntactic and morphophonological (intralinguistic) information than to semantic (extralinguistic) information.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , October 1991 , pp. 571 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Data from the experiment were initially reported in a paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society, Harlech, UK, 16–19 September, 1988. The author would like to thank D. I. Slobin for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, J. M. (1961). The morphophonemics of gender in Spanish nouns. Lingua 10, 285–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bem, S. L. (1981). Gender schema theory: a cognitive account of sex typing. Psychological Review 84, 354–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. (1981). Regularity vs anomaly: the acquisition of Hebrew inflectional morphology. Journal of Child Language 8, 265–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Berman, R. A. (1985). The acquisition of Hebrew. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1. The data. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Böhme, K. (1983). Children's understanding and awareness of German possessive pronouns. Unpublished doctoral Dissertation. University of Nijmegen, Holland.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1985). Beyond communicative adequacy: from piecemeal knowledge to an integrated system in the child's acquisition of language. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 5. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1985). The acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1. The data. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Deutsch, W. & Pechman, T. (1978). Ihr, dir, or mir?. On the acquisition of pronouns in German children. Cognition 6, 155–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fagot, B. I., Leinbach, M. D. & Hagan, R. (1986). Gender labeling and the adoption of sex-types behaviors. Developmental Psychology 22, 440–3.Google Scholar
Fodor, I. (1959). The origin of grammatical gender. Lingua 8, 1–41.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. (1985). ‘He has too much hard questions’: the acquisition of the linguistic mass-count distinction in much and many. Journal of Child Language 12, 395–415.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S. A., Collman, P. & Maccoby, E. E. (1986). Inferring properties from categories versus inferring categories from properties: the case of gender. Child Development 57, 396–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, P. (1985). Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: the case of the count/mass distinction. Cognition 20, 209–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenberg, J. H. (1966). Language universals. In Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), Current trends in linguistics. Vol. 3. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Henzl, V. M. (1975). Acquisition of grammatical gender in Czech. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 10, 188–98.Google Scholar
Hernández-Pina, F. (1984). Teorías psicosociolingüísticas y su aplicación a la adquisición del español como lengua materna. Madrid: Siglo XXI.Google Scholar
Ibraham, M. H. (1973). Grammatical gender. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kail, M. & Charvillat, A. (1988). Local and topological processing in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children. Journal of Child Language 15, 537–662.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language. A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1983). Language development as a problem-solving process. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 22, 1–22.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986). Some recent issues in the study of language acquisition. In Lyons, J., Coates, R., Deuchar, M. & Gazdar, G. (eds.), New horizons in linguistics 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Katz, N., Baker, E. & Macnamara, J. (1974). What's in a name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. Child Development 65, 469–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, Y. (1983 a). The acquisition of Hebrew plurals: the case of the missing gender category. Journal of Child Language 10, 107–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levy, Y. (1983 b). It's frogs all the way down. Cognition 15, 75–93.Google Scholar
Levy, Y. (1988). On the early learning of formal grammatical systems: evidence from studies of the acquisition of gender and countability. Journal of Child Language 15, 179–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
López, F. (1984). Adquisición de rol y de la identidad sexual. Infancia y Aprendizaje 26, 25–40.Google Scholar
López, F. (1988). Adquisición y desarrollo de la identidad sexual y de género. In Fernández, J. (ed.), Nuevas perspectivas en el desarrollo del sexo y el género. Madrid: Pirámide.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1978). The acquisition of morphophonology. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development Serial 43, No. 1–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1988). The acquisition of formal word classes. In Levy, Y., Schlesinger, I., & Braine, M. (eds.) Categories and processes in language acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. & Chalkley, M. A. (1980). The internal language of children's syntax: the ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 2. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Martínez, J. A. (1977). Los elementos de la gramática y el género en castellano. In Varios autores. Estudios ofrecidos a Emilio Alarcos Llorach. Tomo I. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo.Google Scholar
Mills, A. E. (1985). The acquisition of German. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1. The data. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mills, A. E. (1986 a). The acquisition of gender. A study of English and German. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, A. E. (1986 b). Acquisition of the natural-gender rule in English and German. Linguistics 24, 31–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulford, R. (1983). Semantic and formal factors in the comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 22, 83–91.Google Scholar
Mulford, R. (1985). Comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender: semantic versus formal factors. Journal of Child Language 12, 443–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Omar, M. E. (1970). The acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a native language. Unpublished doctoral Dissertation. Georgetown University.Google Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, M. (1988). La atención a factores intralinguísticos en la adquisición del lenguaje. Estudios de Psicología 34/35, 211–27.Google Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, M. (1991). Semantic versus formal theories of gender acquisition: a criticism of Mulford's study. Archives de Psychologie, 59, 3–16.Google Scholar
Popova, M. I. (1973). Grammatical elements of language in the speech of pre-school children. In Ferguson, C. A. and Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Radulovic, L. (1975). Acquisition of language: studies of Dubrovnik children. Unpublished doctoral Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Rosemblat, A. (1962). Morfología del género an español. Comportamiento de las terminaciones en-o, -a. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 16, 31–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneuwly, B. (1978). Zum erwerb des genus im Deutschen: eine mögliche Strategie. Manuscript, Max-Plank-Institut, Nijmegen, Holland.Google Scholar
Seco, R. (1973). Manual de gramática española. Madrid: Aguilar.Google Scholar
Serbin, I. A. & Sprafkin, C. (1986). The salience of gender and the process of sex-typing in three- to seven-year-old children. Child Development 57, 1188–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1966). The acquisition of Russian as a native language. In Smith, F. & Miller, G. A. (eds), The genesis of language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1982). La construcción de la gramática por el niño. In Monfort, M. (ed.) Los trastornos de la comunicación en el niño. I Simposium de Logopedia. Madrid: C.E.P.E.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1985). Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 2. Theoretical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Smoczynska, M. (1985). The acquisition of Polish. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1. The data. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Soler, R. (1984). Adquisición y utilización del articulo. In Siguán, M. (ed.), Estudios sobre psicología del lenguaje infantíl. Madrid: Pirámide.Google Scholar
Taeschner, T. (1983). The sun is feminine. A study of language acquisition in bilingual children. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Tucker, G. R., Lambert, W. E. & Rigault, A. (1977). The French speaker's skill with grammatical gender: an example of rule-governed behavior. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vila, I. (1984). Yo siempre hablo catalán y castellano: datos de una investigación en curso sobre la adquisición del lenguaje en niños bilingües. In Siguán, M. (ed.), Adquisición precoz de una segunda lengua. Barcelona: Publicacións i Edicións de la Universitat de Barcelona.Google Scholar
Zakharova, A. V. (1973). Acquisition of forms of grammatical case by preschool children. In Ferguson, C. A. and Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar