It's frogs all the way down

Levy, Yonata

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90034-3

Cited by 119 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…What this type of error shows, though, is the greater importance of form than meaning to these children, because the phonological correlates to the gender marking, which are purely formal, prove more salient to the children than the semantic correlates, which are meaningful. Levy (1983) reported similar findings from her extensive study of grammatical gender acquisition in Hebrew. Of course, the grammatical gender system is a purely formal system for all nouns that are not animates; at some level, there is no "meaning" to be acquired, even later in development.…”

Section: A Meaning-based Reinterpretation Of the Experimental (Novel supporting

confidence: 64%

“…le crayon in French ( ¼ the pencil) is no more intrinsically masculine than la plume ( ¼ the pen) is intrinsically feminine). The survey by Levy (1983) of children's acquisition of grammatical gender in languages that are highly "gender-loaded" (i.e. include several instantiations of grammatical gender, such as Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and German) revealed that young 2-year-olds have little difficulty -and make few errors -using the correct gender markings with pronouns referring to inanimate nouns, and with verbs that must be inflected for gender.…”

Section: A Meaning-based Reinterpretation Of the Experimental (Novel mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Naigles

2002

Cognition

115

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Section: A Meaning-based Reinterpretation Of the Experimental (Novel supporting

confidence: 64%

Section: A Meaning-based Reinterpretation Of the Experimental (Novel mentioning

confidence: 99%

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Naigles

2002

Cognition

115

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“…Henzl, 1975 ;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979 ;Levy, 1983 ;Berman, 1985 ;Mills, 1986 ;Chini, 1994 ;Mü ller, 2000 ;Kupisch, Mü ller & Cantone, 2002 ;Kuchenbrandt, 2005 ;. Based on child data from French, German, Czech, Hebrew, Spanish and Italian, it has been argued that two-year-olds formulate language-specific rules on the basis of formal information.…”

Section: T H E G E N D E R S Y S T E M O F R U S S I a Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian

Rodina

Westergaard

2012

J. Child Lang.

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ABSTRACTThis article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6–4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children rely on certain morphosyntactic micro-cues in the course of acquisition of semantic agreement. A discrepancy is observed in the acquisition of semantic agreement across the different noun classes, and this suggests that children are highly sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and morphology and use detailed input information to make specific inferences concerning the gender of different noun classes. Furthermore, we argue that acquisition data may provide a more accurate account of how gender assignment proceeds in the mind of a speaker than has been traditionally assumed by gender assignment theories.

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“…One fundamental category that has received much attention in research on language development is the category of gender (e.g. Popova, 1973 ;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979 ;Levy, 1983 ;Mills, 1985;Mulford, 1985 ;Smoczynska, 1985;Pérez-Pereira, 1991). Gender, when present in a language, is of great importance as it determines inflectional processes of agreement, reference, and declension.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Diminutivization supports gender acquisition in Russian children

et al. 2003

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A B S T R A C TGender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Forty-six children (2 ;9-4 ;8) were shown pictures of familiar and of novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which all contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender. Half were presented as simplex (e.g. jozh ' porcupine ') and half as diminutive forms (e.g. jozhik 'porcupine-DIM '). Children produced fewer agreement errors for diminutive than for simplex nouns, indicating that the regularizing features of diminutives enhance gender categorization. The study demonstrates how features of child-directed speech can facilitate language learning. I N T R O D U C T I O NGrammatical category learning is a fundamental component of language acquisition because grammatical categories lie at the basis of morphology and [*] This study was supported by NATO collaborative linkage grant #975293 awarded to Patricia Brooks, Olga Fedorova, and Vera Kempe. We would like to thank the children, parents, and staff at day care centres #250, 735, 859, and 2023 of the city of Moscow for their participation and support of the study.

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It's frogs all the way down

Cited by 119 publications

References 6 publications

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language

A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian

Diminutivization supports gender acquisition in Russian children

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