Implicit Knowledge of Grammatical Gender in Preschool Children

Abstract

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female. Half stimuli had names of feminine gender and half of masculine gender. In Experiment 1, Italian speaking adults and preschoolers classified animals according to the nominal gender. This effect was not found with English speaking participants (Experiment 2) but confirmed with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Italian-speaking children (Experiment 3). These results showed an implicit knowledge of grammatical gender in preschoolers, suggesting that semantic processing may be modulated by linguistic information.

Gender matters: From L1 grammar to L2 semantics

“…In sum, the current study found a bilingual gender effect with animate, but not inanimate, nouns, thus indicating that gender biases are constrained by the semantic properties of the nouns, which lie at the core of the transfer (e.g., Andonova, D'Amico, Devescovi & Bates, 2004;Sera, Elieff, Forbes, Burch, Rodriguez & Dubouis, 2002;Belacchi & Cubelli, 2012;Bender et al, 2011). The role of animacy in gender transfer, previously outlined in the weak version of SAGH (Vigliocco et al, 2005; see also Sera et al, 2002), has found full support in our study.…”

“…The superior status of animate nouns have been associated with the fact that the semantic component of gender in animate referents associated with biological gender reduces the processing demands for establishing agreement and coreference with other parts of the sentence (Deutsch et al, 1999). Alarcón (2009Alarcón ( , 2010; see also Belacchi & Cubelli, 2012) further suggests that in pronoun resolution native speakers take equal advantage of morphological and semantic cues, while nonnative speakers favor semantic cues rather than morphological cues, with the latter being less available for automatic access. Indeed, animacy has been confirmed to have a privileged status for transfer to nonnative processing, which is accessible outside of the L1 linguistic system (semantic core hypothesis, Spinner & Thomas, 2014).…”

Grammatical gender and linguistic relativity: A systematic review

“…The most common has been the voice choice task (16 different publications using this task were discovered in this review), in which participants are asked to assign a male or female voice to objects, with many finding that the sex of the voice and the grammatical gender of the target are indeed broadly consistent (e.g., Kurinski, Jambor, & Sera, 2016;Lambelet, 2016;Ramos & Roberson, 2011;Sera, Berge, & del Castillo Pintado, 1994;Sera et al, 2002). Similar results have been found when asking participants to assign a human name or a sex to an object ("sex assignment" tasks; e.g., Belacchi & Cubelli, 2012;Flaherty, 2001), and when asking participants to rate on a scale the similarity ("similarity task") between pictures of male and female humans and objects (Phillips & Boroditsky, 2003). In object-name memory association tasks, participants are instructed to remember male and female names that substitute object names, such that "chair" might now be "Patricia," and the results have sometimes shown that the ability to recall the human name is enhanced if it is congruent with the grammatical gender of the object in question (Boroditsky & Schmidt, 2000).…”

Animacy, Frequency and Working Memory Effects in the Acquisition of a Noun-Adjective Agreement Pattern in L2 under Incidental Learning Conditions

“…Because we chose epicenes, our participants could not rely on any semantic cues in determining whether a noun was masculine or feminine; their only cues were morphological. Belacchi & Cubelli (2012) showed a revealing cross-linguistic difference between Italian and English speakers that is pertinent to the role of morphology in gender categorization and is relevant to our findings. In their studies only Italian speakers-both children and adults-were successful in categorizing epicenes as either masculine or feminine; the English speakers performed at chance.…”