Young children learning spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition

Casey Lew-Williams, Anne Fernald

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

275 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)193-198
Number of pages6
JournalPsychological Science
Volume18
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2007
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Psychology

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