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BILINGUAL ACQUSITION OF GENDER
An i mpressive amount of d ata has b een collected and analysed through research in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of gender so far. Attempts have been made to solve the puzzle of how children assign nouns to genders, and ho w they are able to learn correct agreement forms and use them as productively as they do even as early as age t wo . One possible explan ation is that children memorize g ender as a p art of each noun. Ho wev er, a few strong points against su ch an approach have been claimed, and are best summarized by Corb ett (1991: 7): First, native speakers typically mak e few or no mistakes in the use of gender; if the gender of every noun were remembered individually, we would expect more errors . Second, words borro wed from other languages acquired a gender, which shows that there is a mechanism for assigning and not just remembering gender. And third, wh en presented with invented words, speakers give them a g ender and they do so with a high degree o f consistency. Thus native sp eakers h ave the ability to `work out' the gend er of a noun: models of this ability are called `assignment systems'. Rote learning is far from being the ideal way of gender assignment. A more likely route to learning a gender system is believed to begin with recognising the patterns operating in a given language rather than memorizing ev ery single noun with its gender. For young speakers of a morphologically co mplex language, e.g. Polish, such patterns, namely "the fact that the occurrence of certain agreeing forms (on verbs, adjectives and so on ) depends on the presence o f nouns of a certain gender" (Corb ett 1991: 82), are easy to recognize. It remains to be clarified ho w the p atterns of distributing particular inflectional suffixes are acquired in child speech . What emerges fro m the work on various languages is the fact that children do not follow one particular order of acquiring the distributional rules, since they often depend on the morphological complexity of the languag e, as well as the relative strength of the extra- (s emantic) and interlinguistic (formal) clues available to them. The studies carried out oscillate between two theoretical positions (PИrez-Pereira 1991b: 4): a. gender differentiation is established on the basis of semantic features coming fro m extralinguistic reality (natural gender theory) ­ children primarily attribute the gender o f words on the basis o f the s emantics (see Mulford 1983); b. gender is a phenomenon of the linguistic system ­ agreement is the essence of g ender; children are able to recognize that e.g., nouns with a p articular ending co-occu r with other parts of speech such as pronouns or articles; morphological and syntactic data is the most important (see Karmiloff-Smith 1979; Maratsos 1980; Levy 1983a) Research on language acquisition can provide valuable and necessary insights to the way such systems work on condition that basic linguistic descriptions of the phenomena to be investigated are


available. Fro m the early years of the twentieth century, researchers have been documenting the speech of children using diaries, parental notes and questionnaires, and later also audio- and video-recordings to investigate, among hundreds of other issues, the emerg ence and development of grammatical gender in the speech of young speakers. Th e limitations of this talk allow me to look at the recent studies in the acquisition of grammatical gender only, i.e. fro m 1980s onwards. Both monolingual and bilingual children have been studied, and languages with both rich as well as poor gender systems have been investigated. The first part of my talk, i.e. a co mparative overview of methods and results obtained by other researchers, is aimed at setting the scene for the second p art of the t alk, which will fo cus on my o wn Ph D p roject. The AGGA project (Acquisition of Gender and Gender Agreement) investigates the acquisition of gender in the speech of Polish-English children, who are raised bilingually from birth. The objectives are: (1) to analyze the process of acquisition, (2) to investigate the degree of independence of the t wo g ender systems, and the degree o f interference bet ween them; (3) to determine the importance of intra- and extralinguistic clues used by children when assigning gender to Polish and English wo rds. Based on wh at well-kno wn and highly-respected research ers in the fi eld have concluded so far, t wo hypotheses can be suggested: a) Polish-English children will learn gender distinctions in a similar way to monolingual children (co mparing the error rate), and b) the t wo gend er systems will develop highly independently. In the second part o f my talk I will present preliminary results to the following claims: 1. the Polish gender system d evelops highly independently from the English gender system 2. intralingusitic clues play a mo re significant role than ex tralinguistic clues My datab ase consists of longitudinal data that have been collected from five Polish-English bilingual children between March 2006-February 20 08. Illustration and support for the cl aims stated above will be tak en from data obtained fro m one girl, Amelie, whose speech has been audio- and videorecorded bet ween the age o f 26-42 months. References:
Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender . Cambridge, Cambridge Univ ersity Pr ess. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A function al approach to child languag e: A study of deter miner s and refer ence. Cambridge, CUP. Levy, Y. (1983a). "It's frogs all the way down." Cognition 15 : 75-93. Maratsos, M.- M. A. C. (1980). The internal language of children 's syntax : the ontogen esis and representation of syntactic categories. Children's Language. K . N elson . N ew Y ork, Gardner Pr ess. 2. Mulford, R. (1983). " Semantic and formal f actors in th e co mprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender." Pap ers and Reports on Child Language Dev elopment 22: 83-91. PИrez-Pereira, M. (1991b). "Semantic versus formal theories of gender acquisition : a criticism of Mu lford's study." Archives de Psycholog ie 59: 3-16.