UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
Graduate School of Humanities
July 2013
On the Acquisition of Grammatical Gender –
When ‘Late Phenomenon’ meets ‘Early
Phenomenon’
An Empirical Study with Dutch-Greek Bilingual Children and
its Relevance for Investigations of Bilingual SLI
by Evelyn Egger
Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Clinical Linguistics
Supervisors:
Dr. J. de Jong
Prof. Dr. A.C.J. Hulk
ABSTRACT
The present study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in a group of Greek-Dutch bilingual
children aged 4;4 – 13;3 years. The subjects were tested on determiner-noun and determiner-adjectivenoun agreement in both Dutch and Greek and were grouped according to their scores on a vocabulary test
in the respective languages. Results for the Dutch tests revealed a tendency for the Greek-Dutch
bilinguals to overgeneralize the neuter determiner het to common nouns which was taken as evidence for
increased gender awareness. Given that the English-Dutch bilinguals in Unsworth (2013a) and the ItalianDutch bilinguals in Algoe (2011) did not show overgeneralization of het, it is argued that the way gender
is marked in a bilingual’s ‘other language’ affects the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. In
contrast, performance patterns on the Greek tests were in line with previous findings from Mastropavlou
(2006) for Greek monolinguals and with Unsworth, Argyri, Cornips, Hulk, Sorace & Tsimpli (2011b) for
English-Greek bilinguals suggesting no cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to Greek. Based on
previous findings from Greek and Dutch language-impaired monolinguals, it is suggested that the positive
cross-linguistic influence from Greek on the acquisition of Dutch gender may also extend to languageimpaired bilingual populations.
Keywords: grammatical gender, agreement, bilingual acquisition, cross-linguistic influence
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................4
2 Gender ........................................................................................................................................................10
2.1 Gender Assignment vs. Gender Agreement ........................................................................................10
2.2 Gender in Dutch ..................................................................................................................................13
2.2.1 Descriptive Notes .........................................................................................................................13
2.2.2 Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Dutch .............................................................................15
2.3 Gender in Greek ..................................................................................................................................21
2.3.1 Descriptive notes ..........................................................................................................................21
2.3.2 Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Greek .............................................................................24
3 The Study ...................................................................................................................................................25
3.1 Background .........................................................................................................................................25
3.2 Method ................................................................................................................................................30
3.2.1 Participants ...................................................................................................................................30
3.2.2 Materials ......................................................................................................................................31
3.2.3 Procedure .....................................................................................................................................36
3.2.4 Coding and analysis .....................................................................................................................36
3.3 Results .................................................................................................................................................38
3.3.1 Background measures ..................................................................................................................38
3.3.2 Dutch Production Tasks ...............................................................................................................40
3.3.3 Dutch Knowledge Task (GJT) .....................................................................................................45
3.3.4 Comparisons ................................................................................................................................46
3.3.4 Greek Production Tasks ...............................................................................................................51
3.3.5 Greek Knowledge Task (GJT) .....................................................................................................57
3.3.6 Comparisons ................................................................................................................................58
4 Discussion ..................................................................................................................................................61
4.1 General Discussion .............................................................................................................................61
4.2 Relevance & implications for the study of bilinguals SLI ..................................................................66
5 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................................69
References .....................................................................................................................................................70
APPENDICES ..............................................................................................................................................75
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1 Introduction
Grammatical gender is an intriguing phenomena present in many of the world’s languages. Research on
the acquisition of grammatical gender systems indicates that it is a particularly vulnerable area for second
language learners (e.g. Montrul, Foote, & Perpiñán, 2008; Dewaele & Veronique, 2001), with many
showing signs of fossilization in the form of persistent difficulties with gender marking (e.g.
Francheschina, 2005). For children growing up bilingually from a young age, the general finding is that
they lag behind monolinguals in the acquisition of gender, which is usually attributed to factors related to
language input or exposure (e.g. Hulk & Cornips, 2006a; Unsworth, Argyri, Cornips, Hulk, Sorace &
Tsimpli, 2011b). Results for children growing up bilingually from birth are more mixed with some
researchers finding that simultaneous bilinguals show a similar developmental pattern than monolinguals
albeit with a slight delay (e.g. Kupisch, Müller & Cantone, 2002), while others report a positive influence
of the dual-language exposure in the form of an accelerated rate of acquisition (e.g. Cornips & Hulk,
2006). Many explanations have been put forward to account for the differences and similarities between
monolingual and bilingual acquisition of gender, the most frequently discussed factors being age of onset,
length of exposure, input quality and the nature of the L1 (see Cornips & Hulk, 2008 and Unsworth, Hulk
& Marinis, 2011 for a discussion of the relevant factors and related findings). Grammatical gender has
also been found to be an affected area in atypical language development in many languages (see Keij,
Cornips, van Hout & van Emmerik, 2012; Orgassa, 2009 for Dutch; Silveira, 2011 for Portugese;
Clahsen, 1989 & 1991 for German). Such findings complicate the picture of bilingual language
acquisition because the linguistic profiles of these two populations (bilinguals and children with SLI) may
overlap in a given language, which could lead to confounds and even potential misdiagnoses of bilingual
children as having SLI and of bilingual children with SLI as simply demonstrating the familiar ‘bilingual
delay’ (Paradis, 2005). To avoid such confounds, it is important to carefully investigate the
developmental paths of various monolingual and bilingual populations with and without SLI and compare
the groups against each other in order to be able to draw a boundary between typical second language
acquisition and language pathology.
Although grammatical gender has been identified as an area of persistent difficulty for both
second language learners (including bilinguals) and language-impaired children, it is clear that the
linguistic profiles of the various populations are subject to cross-linguistic variation. One obvious reason
for the attested variation are structural differences between the languages under investigation and in the
present case more specifically, the manifestation and marking of grammatical gender. Grammatical
gender is a means of nominal classification present in many languages of the world. According to Corbett
(1991) and many other linguists in the field, a defining characteristic of grammatical gender systems is
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agreement, i.e. the overt marking of gender on other elements outside the head noun itself. Thus, a basic
distinction that pertains to grammatical gender is made between gender assignment and gender
agreement. Gender assignment refers to the categorization of all nouns of a language into a small number
of gender categories, the most common distinctions being masculine-feminine, masculine-feminineneuter and common-neuter, although systems based on other criteria (e.g. animacy) exist as well. Gender
assignment of nouns is usually determined by a combination of both semantic and formal (morphological
or phonological) rules. This is because semantic criteria such as biological sex (masculine vs. feminine)
cannot be applied to inanimate entities, which is why many languages pose an additional set of
morphological or phonological rules for the gender assignment of such nouns (for example in German, all
nouns ending in –heit are feminine). As a consequence, gender assignment in a given language may
appear more or less arbitrary, depending on the combination of semantic and formal assignment rules, as
well as the amount of exceptions to these rules. Thus, grammatical gender is said to be an inherent
property of nouns and as such, it is assumed to be part of the lexical entries of nouns that has to be learned
(at least partly) on an item-by-item basis. With regard to the defining property of grammatical gender, i.e.
agreement, there is a general consensus that it is a purely syntactic process, which in the generative
framework (e.g. Chomsky, 1995), is typically described in terms of the matching or sharing of features
between related elements. In other words, agreement is the systematic co-variance of related forms, i.e.
the head noun (also called agreement trigger or controller) and all other elements that lie within the scope
of agreement. Just as languages differ in terms of gender assignment rules, so do they with regard to the
scope of agreement marking, i.e. the number and types of elements that have to be overtly marked for
gender. For example, Modern English has a very restricted gender system, which is primarily based on
natural gender and only surfaces on pronominals. Thus, English only shows (natural) gender agreement
between singular pronouns and antecedents as illustrated in (1) and (2) 1.
(1) Yesterday I saw Mary [FEM] . She [FEM] was taking her [FEM] dog for a walk.
(2) Yesterday I saw George [MASC] . He [MASC] was taking his [MASC] dog for a walk.
In contrast to English, German also shows gender agreement in the wider nominal domain,
namely on determiners and attributive adjectives, as exemplified in (3) and (4). Although gender marking
is more extensive in German than in English, the high number of syncretic forms (e.g. the definite article
for plural nouns of all three genders is die; the indefinite article for both neuter and masculine nouns in
the nominative singular is ein, etc.) makes the German gender system appear rather opaque.
1
Note that the pronominal gender system of Modern English differs from the more proper instances of grammatical gender
systems (e.g. in Romance languages) in that gender is no longer an inflectional category, i.e. overtly marked by means of affixes,
but it is said to be ‘covert’.
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Ein
kleiner
A-MASC little-MASC
Hund
sass
vor
der
Tür.
dog-MASC
sat
in front of
the
door.
Katze
sass
vor
der
Tür.
cat-FEM
sat
in front of
the
door.
‘A little dog sat in front of the door.’
(4)
Eine
kleine
A-FEM little-FEM
‘A little cat sat in front of the door.’
Grammatical gender in Italian is considerably more transparent compared to the German system.
In Italian, gender is not only expressed on determiners and attributive adjectives (ex. (5)), but also on
predicative adjectives (ex. (6)) and in most cases, also on the head noun itself with masculine singular
nouns typically ending in –o (ex. (6)) and the majority of feminine singular nouns in –a (ex. (5)).
Moreover, Italian exhibits gender concord in a variety of constructions involving past participles, such as
the present perfect of verbs that take essere (‘to be’) as an auxiliary (ex. (7), (8)) and past participles that
are preceded by a direct object pronoun (ex. (9), (10)), among others.
(5)
La
bambin-a
piccolo-a
canta
un
canzon-e.
The-FEM
girl-FEM
little-FEM
sings
a-MASC song-MASC.
‘The little girl sings a song.’
(6)
Il
libr-o
è
ross-o.
The-MASC
book-MASC
is
red-MASC.
‘The book is red.’
(7)
Massimo/lui
è
partit-o.
Massimo/he-MASC
has
left-MASC
‘Massimo/He has left.’
(8)
Maria/lei
è
Maria/she-FEM has
partit-a.
left-FEM.
‘Maria/She has left.’
(9)
Pietro ha
ricevut-o
la
letter-a.
Peter
received-PP.MASC
the-FEM
letter-FEM
has-3.SG
‘Peter has received the letter.’
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L’
It-FEM
∅
ha
ricevut-a.
has-3.SG
received-PP. FEM
‘He has received it.’
As can be seen from the examples above, grammatical gender marking is subject to considerable
cross-linguistic variation in terms of scope and transparency. Of the various kinds of agreement, the focus
of the present paper will lie on nominal agreement 2 and more specifically, on determiner-noun and
adjective-noun agreement. We assume the basic structure of a noun phrase (or DP) to be as in (11),
although the sequential ordering of the constituents is subject to cross-linguistic variation (e.g. attributive
adjectives in Italian typically occur in post-nominal positions, while in German they occur in prenominal
positions).
(11)
Given the cross-linguistic differences in gender assignment and agreement marking, it is
reasonable to expect that the acquisition of grammatical gender is subject to high levels of variability
across languages and populations. While most research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has
focused on determiner-noun agreement, studies on adjectival agreement are rather scarce. A general
finding that pertains to both monolinguals and bilinguals is that transparent and extensive marking of
gender facilitates acquisition. For example, many Romance languages exhibit a high degree of
transparency with regard to gender marking (e.g. Spanish and Italian) which leads to early acquisition of
gender compared to other morpho-syntactic phenomena in these languages (e.g. Kupisch, Müller &
Cantone, 2002; Eichler, Jansen & Müller, 2012). In contrast, in languages with more restricted and
opaque gender marking, both monolingual and bilingual children have been observed to show a
2
As opposed to, for example, agreement in the verbal domain (e.g. subject-verb agreement).
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protracted course of acquisition (e.g. Blom, Polisenska & Weerman, 2008 for Dutch, Gathercole &
Thomas, 2005 for Welsh; Rodina & Westergaard, 2013 for Norwegian). Moreover, differences between
monolingual and bilingual acquisition of grammatical gender in a given language can be more or less
pronounced. Some researchers have found highly similar developmental paths between monolinguals and
bilinguals, while others observe both quantitative and qualitative differences between the two populations
(e.g. Hulk & Cornips, 2006b). Another interesting observation is that not all genders of a language seem
to be acquired with the same ease or difficulty. For example, in many Romance languages, masculine
gender is thought to be the unmarked form that functions as a default during early stages of acquisition.
This is reflected in a tendency to overgeneralize masculine gender to feminine nouns and consequently,
lower accuracy rates for feminine than masculine gender (e.g. Nicoladis & Marchak, 2011 for French;
Canta, 2012 for Italian). With regard to differences between the various types of agreement, a number of
studies have found evidence that determiner-noun agreement poses less difficulty than adjective-noun
agreement (e.g. Nicoladis & Marchak, 2011; Canta, 2012; Montrul & Potowski, 2007). A number of
explanations have been put forward to account for this difference between determiner-noun and adjectivenoun agreement. One obvious factor is frequency, that is, determiners are among the most frequently used
lexical items in most languages. Moreover, although gender marking in the form of agreement is a
defining characteristic of gender languages, not all languages exhibit gender marking on nouns and in
those languages where gender is overtly marked on nouns, it is not always consistent and usually a fair
number of exceptions exist. This has led to the assumption that children use the gender of the determiner
as a cue for the gender of nouns (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007), which would explain the higher
accuracy rate on determiner-noun agreement compared to adjective-noun agreement. Others have
proposed an account in terms of syntactic complexity, namely that adjectival agreement involves an
additional syntactic derivation compared to determiner-noun agreement and that similarly, the derivation
of post-nominal adjectives requires even more syntactic operations (i.e. movement) and is thus, more
complex than the derivation required for the agreement of pre-nominal adjectives (Roulet-Amiot &
Jakubowicz, 2006).
Although studies on the acquisition of gender agreement have offered important insights into both
cross-linguistic variation and the developmental pattern of various populations, more research is needed
to come to a better understanding of the issues involved and to extend the findings to less-well studied
populations. The purpose of the present paper is twofold. The first part discusses gender acquisition in
typically developing populations and investigates the acquisition of gender agreement in a group of
Dutch-Greek bilinguals. The motivation for this is the fact that there is a stark contrast between the
developmental patterns that have been attested in the two languages. While research on the acquisition of
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the Dutch gender system has revealed persistent difficulties with gender assignment and agreement in all
populations (e.g. Blom, Polisenska & Weerman, 2008; Cornips, van der Hoeck & Verwer, 2006; Hulk &
Cornips, 2006b), studies investigating gender acquisition in Greek have found quite the opposite, at least
with regard to monolingual and early bilingual populations (e.g. Stephany, 1995, Mastropavlou, 2006,
Tsimpli, 2003). Given that the nature of the L1 or ‘other language’ has been found to influence bilingual
acquisition (Cornips & Hulk, 2006; Eichler, Jansen & Müller, 2012), it is interesting to see how the
Dutch-Greek bilinguals compare to other bilingual populations. With regard to gender acquisition in
Dutch, the first research question thus asks whether bilingual children whose other language has a highly
transparent system and shows extensive gender marking (like Italian or Greek) have an advantage over
bilinguals whose other language shows opaque or no gender marking (e.g. English). To this end, the
performance and error patterns of the subjects under investigation will be compared to those found in
other studies on gender acquisition that have used the same kind of tasks and material (i.e. Unsworth,
2013a; Algoe, 2011) to see whether the transparency of the gender system in the other language somehow
facilitates the discovery of the Dutch gender paradigm. The second and third research questions concern
the relationship between determiner-noun agreement and adjectival agreement. Thus, the present study
seeks to replicate the finding of an asymmetry between determiner-noun and adjective-noun agreement
(with the latter yielding higher error rates) and parallel improvement for the two types of agreement with
increasing proficiency in both Dutch and Greek. As a fourth objective, we will examine the error types
that Dutch-Greek children make with adjectival agreement in Greek and compare the error patterns to
those found in other studies (i.e. Canta, 2012 for Italian). The fifth research question to be addressed in
the paper is whether the Dutch-Greek bilinguals show similar performance patterns as previously attested
in the two languages, namely the finding of an asymmetry between common and neuter nouns in Dutch
(i.e. high accuracy rates for common and low accuracy rates for neuter nouns and overgeneralization of de
to neuter contexts, but not the other way round) and between neuter, masculine and feminine in Greek
(with neuter functioning as a default and yielding high accuracy rates and masculine being the most
problematic of the three genders). Finally, the last research question concerns the children’s relative
performance on the production and judgment tasks for the various gender categories (i.e. whether they
perform better on judgment than on production.)
The second aim of the paper is to discuss the results of the typically developing (TD) GreekDutch bilingual children of the present study in terms of their relevance to research on bilingual SLI. The
specific language combination of Dutch and Greek might be particularly interesting because of certain
differences between the two gender systems and their acquisition. Another advantage of studying DutchGreek bilinguals is that both monolingual and bilingual acquisition by children with and without language
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impairment is relatively well-documented for both languages. Based on the present findings, we will
consider the possibility of a positive influence of bilingualism on the acquisition of Dutch gender by
children with SLI provided that the gender system and marking of the ‘other language’ (e.g. Greek) is
extensive and transparent.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2.1 discusses the notion of grammatical gender and
gender agreement in some more detail. In addition, a short description of the Greek and Dutch gender
system will be provided (2.2.1 & 2.3.1) and previous findings on gender acquisition in the two languages
that are relevant for the present study will be summarized (2.2.2 & 2.3.2). Section 3.1 will present a short
review of research on gender agreement in a variety of bilingual populations and introduces the specific
research questions of the present study. The experimental method will be outlined in section 3.2, followed
by the presentation of the data in 3.3 and the discussion of the results in section 4.1. The findings will
then be interpreted with regard to their relevance to investigations of bilingual SLI (4.2). Finally, the
paper will conclude with a summary (section 5).
2 Gender
2.1 Gender Assignment vs. Gender Agreement
Many languages use a grammatical gender system to classify their nouns into a small set of
categories (also called noun classes or genders). The grammatical category of gender has to be
distinguished from biological (or natural) gender, which is a semantic property that is restricted to
animate nouns (e.g. girl vs. boy, niece vs. nephew, chicken/hen vs. rooster). Similarly, grammatical
gender should not be confused with declensional class, which defines the forms a particular noun has,
although there is often a close correspondence between the two (Comrie, 1999). Following Corbett
(1991), gender assignment is determined by two major types of principles or rules, semantic rules that are
based on a noun’s meaning and formal rules that are based on a noun’s form. Although all gender systems
have a semantic core, a purely semantic division may not be applicable to all nouns and thus, in addition
to semantic rules, most languages also have formal rules that determine a noun’s gender according to its
phonological or morphological properties 3. For instance, many Romance languages use a two-way gender
3
Corbett (1991) distinguishes between phonological rules that refer to a single form of the noun, while morphological rules are
usually based on a whole inflectional paradigm, although the distinction between the two is not always clear-cut. An example of a
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system with the categories masculine and feminine, where all inanimate nouns are assigned a gender on
the basis of formal rules, e.g. in Spanish nouns ending in –o are typically masculine and most nouns
ending in –a are feminine. Gender assignment of nouns that is guided by formal rules often leaves the
impression that the classification is somewhat arbitrary in that there is no semantic motivation for the
choice of a particular gender, but rather it is determined by the grammar alone. Moreover, in languages
that use both semantic and formal criteria for gender assignment, there might be a conflict between the
semantic and the formal rules. To illustrate, on semantic criteria the German word for ‘girl’ (Mädchen)
should be assigned the feminine gender (because it coincides with a girl’s natural gender), but the formal
rule 4 prevails in this case and classifies it as a neuter noun resulting in a mismatch between the
grammatical and natural gender of the noun.
As already mentioned in the introduction, languages differ with regard to the marking of gender
(i.e. the scope of agreement). Since gender is not always overtly marked on nouns, agreement (also
termed gender concord) is often taken as a defining characteristic of grammatical gender systems or in the
words of Hockett (1958: 231) “genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated
words”. Adopting a generative framework for descriptive purposes, agreement or gender concord in the
nominal domain can be described as follows: All elements involved in gender agreement carry a gender
feature [Gender: X]. The gender specification of nouns (i.e. gender assignment) is typically determined by
a set of language-specific rules (i.e. the semantic and formal assignment rules discussed above) and thus,
it is assumed that the gender feature of nouns carries a fixed value. For example, the German word Blume
(‘flower’) is lexically specified as a feminine noun (according to the gender assignment rules of German)
and consequently, it carries a valued gender feature in the form of [Gender: Feminine]. In contrast, the
gender feature of all other elements that lie within the scope of gender agreement (agreement targets) is
lexically unvalued, i.e. [Gender: ∅]. The syntactic operation of agreement is triggered by the head noun
and involves the matching or sharing of features with the agreement targets (determiners, adjectives, etc.),
as illustrated in (12) below. In other words, during the syntactic computation of agreement, the unvalued
gender features of targets receive their value by the head noun carrying the valued counterpart feature
(Pesetsky & Torrego, 2007).
system that is mainly based on phonological rules is French, while German is described as a morphological system, which
usually make use of all three kinds of rules, morphological, phonological and semantic (Corbett, 1991).
4
In this case, the rule for the formation of diminutives, which always assigns neuter gender.
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Gender assignment refers to the inherent gender feature of nouns, which is commonly assumed to
be stored in the lexicon in form of a fixed value, while gender agreement involves the syntactic operation
whereby the lexically unvalued gender feature of agreement targets receive their value from the head
noun (Kibort & Corbett, 2008). Thus, the crucial difference between gender assignment and gender
agreement is that the former is a property of the lexicon, while the latter is a purely syntactic operation.
Acquisition of grammatical gender involves thus both learning the inherent gender feature of
nouns at the lexical level and the ability to establish gender agreement or concord between a noun and its
agreement targets at the syntactic level. This means that in practice it is very difficult to distinguish
between the two. Because gender agreement requires access to the inherent gender feature assigned to a
noun, agreement errors in production may result either from incorrect gender assignment to nouns (i.e. an
error of the lexicon, e.g. fr: *la livre verte ‘the-FEM green-FEM book’) or alternatively, they may be due to
faulty application of agreement rules (i.e. an error of syntax, e.g. fr.: *le livre verte ‘the-MASC green-FEM
book’). Since not all gender languages mark their nouns overtly and unambiguously for gender, the
determiner is often taken as evidence for lexical assignment of gender, despite the fact that gender errors
with determiners could also be interpreted in terms of agreement (Montrul, Foote & Perpiñán, 2008). The
reason for taking the determiner as indicative for gender assignment is based on the finding that
monolingual children appear to use the gender of the determiner as a cue to gender assignment of nouns
during acquisition (Caroll, 1989; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2008).
In the following sections, we will now turn to descriptions of the Dutch and Greek gender
systems and summarize previous findings of studies on the acquisition of gender in the two languages.
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2.2 Gender in Dutch
2.2.1 Descriptive Notes
Dutch has a two-way gender system that classifies its nouns into neuter and common gender 5. There is no
overt gender marking on nouns, the diminutive suffix –(t)je being an exception since it always assigns
neuter gender in the singular (and thus, takes the neuter determiner het) regardless of the grammatical
gender of the root noun. With regard to the gender assignment rules of nouns, there seem to be some
morphological and semantic regularities, however, these are too limited and come with too many
exceptions to serve as reliable cues to a noun’s gender (Donaldson, 1987). For this reason, gender
assignment of nouns in Dutch is said to be largely arbitrary (Deutsch & Wijnen, 1985). In contrast to
nouns, gender is marked on a number of agreeing elements both inside and outside the noun phrase such
as definite determiners, demonstratives, attributive adjectives, relative pronouns, first person plural
possessives and wh-phrases. Since the focus of the present paper is on determiner-noun and adjectivenoun agreement, only the Dutch article system and the inflectional paradigm for attributive adjectives will
be illustrated here. The definite determiner for common nouns is de, while neuter nouns take the definite
determiner het. However, there are no gender distinctions on indefinite determiners, which is always een
and in the plural, where the definite determiner is always de. An overview of the Dutch article system is
provided in Table 1.
Table 1. Overview of the Dutch article system
Definite
Indefinite
Common
Neuter
Common
Neuter
Singular
de
het
een
een
Plural
de
de
-
-
The inflectional paradigm for Dutch attributive adjectives comprises only two forms, a schwa
ending and a bare form. The bare form is required with singular, indefinite neuter nouns, while in all other
contexts gender-marking is neutralized and the adjective is inflected with a schwa for either gender. The
5
Like most Germanic languages, Dutch traditionally had a three-way gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter). However in
most varieties and dialects spoken in the Netherlands, masculine and feminine nouns have collapsed into a common gender that
retains the masculine inflections and pronouns.
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inflectional paradigm for attributive adjectives is presented in Table 2 below and examples for both
genders in the definite and indefinite singular are given in (13) - (16) 6.
Table 2. Inflectional paradigm for attributive adjectives in Dutch
Definite
Indefinite
Common
Neuter
Common
Neuter
Singular
-e
-e
-e
Plural
-e
-e
-e
-∅
(13)
Een
klein-e hond
A
small
-e
dog-COMMON
‘A small dog’
(14)
De
klein-e hond
The
small
dog-COMMON
‘The small dog’
(15)
Een
A
klein-∅ huis
small
house-NEUTER
‘A small house’
(16)
Het
klein-e huis
The
small
house-NEUTER
‘The small house’
As can be seen from this short description, the Dutch gender system is highly opaque with
gender-marking being limited to a handful of agreeing elements and a fair amount of syncretic forms that
neutralize the gender distinction in many contexts. The lack of reliable and consistent cues to Dutch
gender has consequences for its acquisition, to which we will turn in the next section.
6
Since gender-marking on adjectives is neutralized in the plural, it will not be considered here.
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2.2.2 Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Dutch
Monolingual Acquisition
The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch has been shown to be particularly difficult, even for
typically developing monolinguals, as indicated by the delayed mastery of the gender system (at around
age 6 to 7) compared to other morpho-syntactic phenomena (e.g. Blom, Polišenská & Weerman, 2008).
With regard to the acquisition of determiners, four developmental stages have been identified, which are
presented in Table 3.
Table 3. Developmental stages in the acquisition of Dutch determiners (taken from Cornips & Hulk, 2006 with
minor changes)
Stage 1:
only bare nouns
Stage 2:
schwa-element + noun; the schwa-element can be interpreted as the indefinite
article een (before the age of 2)
Stage 3:
a) definite article de with both common and neuter nouns
b) first appearance of het, but massive overgeneralization of the definite
determiner de
Stage 4:
target grammar (not before the age of 6)
As can be seen from the table, children go through a stage where they overgeneralize the definite
determiner de to neuter nouns (e.g. *de huis instead of het huis ‘the house’), however this tendency is
unidirectional in that there is no overgeneralization of het to common nouns (e.g. *het boom instead of de
boom ‘the tree’). The attested overgeneralization pattern is often explained in terms of input-frequencies
or distributions. More specifically, it is argued that common nouns outnumber neuter nouns by a ratio of
approximately 3:1 in token frequency and about 2:1 in type frequency (Van Berkum, 1996 as cited in
Blom, Polisenska & Weerman, 2008). Moreover, the plural definite determiner for both genders is de,
which further adds to the distributional asymmetry between the two determiner forms in the input. Given
the lack of reliable semantic and morphological cues to gender assignment of nouns (especially neuter
nouns), it is assumed that de functions as a default form (Tsimpli & Hulk, to appear) and that the gender
of neuter nouns is acquired on an item-by-item basis (Unsworth, 2008), which is supported by the finding
that production of de with common nouns is target-like from early on, while correct use of het increases
only gradually (Blom et al, 2008). Moreover, it has been argued that certain properties of the Dutch
gender system such as the lack of overt gender-marking on head nouns, the absence of gender distinctions
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in indefinite and plural contexts and the fact that het also functions as a pronoun and nominalizer in
certain constructions (Roodenburg & Hulk, 2008) considerably complicate the discovery of reliable and
salient cues to a noun’s gender which in turn, contributes to the late acquisition of gender in Dutch
(Unsworth, Argyri, Cornips, Hulk, Sorace, & Tsimpli, 2011a). As a consequence, it has been suggested
that young children acquiring Dutch initially are not aware of the presence of gender as an abstract
grammatical feature, which would explain the use of de as a default for any noun during early
development (Stage 3a) (Cornips & Hulk, 2008). At some point, however, children do become aware of
the presence of grammatical gender distinctions (Stage 3b). In other words, they realize that de and het
are related to gender, but they still have to learn the correct gender specification for the various nouns 7. It
is important to note here, that the unidirectional overgeneralization pattern and the late mastery of the
gender system in Dutch are somewhat unusual when looked at from a cross-linguistic perspective
(Cornips & Hulk, 2008). This is because in other languages that employ grammatical gender distinctions,
children do not show such unidirectional overgeneralization patterns and the phenomenon does not seem
to pose a significant problem to L1 children and is thus, generally acquired early (around age 3 to 4,
depending on the semantic and morphological transparency of the system) (see Eichler, Jansen &
Mueller, 2012 for a short review of gender acquisition in Spanish, Italian, French and German; Tsimpli,
2003 for Greek).
Noting that most of the studies on the acquisition of Dutch gender have used production data
only, Unsworth & Hulk (2010a) compared accuracy on gender assignment (i.e. determiner-noun
agreement) in a production and a judgment task. Participants were monolingual children aged 4;3 to 7;6
and were divided into two groups, one with average vocabulary scores (group I) and one with above
average vocabulary scores (group II). The results for the production showed that children with higher
vocabulary scores (group II) performed significantly better than children with average vocabulary scores
(group I) on neuter nouns, but no such difference was found for common nouns since both groups
performed near ceiling (>95% correct). In contrast, there were no significant differences between the
performances of the two groups on the judgment task. A comparison between the production and
judgment data revealed that while group I performed equally well in both tasks, group II had lower
overall scores in judgment than production. For neuter nouns, group I performed significantly better on
the judgment task than the production task, but this difference was not significant for group II. For
common nouns, the reverse was found, namely a significant difference between performance on the
production and judgment tasks for group II, but not group I. Interestingly, the observed significant
difference between judgment and production of common nouns observed for group II goes in the opposite
7
In fact, given that de functions as a default, it has been argued that gender specification has to be learned only for neuter nouns
(Blom et al., 2008).
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direction, that is judgment is worse than production. To account for these findings, it was argued that
children in group II are at a more advanced level in their development of gender than group I and that
unlike group I, they are passed the stage where they use de as a default and thus, are aware of the
paradigmatic relationship between de and het which leads them to occasionally assign neuter gender to
common nouns.
As far as adjectival inflection is concerned, studies have shown that L1 children overgeneralize
the inflected form to contexts that require the bare adjective (e.g. *een kleine huis instead of een klein huis
‘a small house’), while errors in the other direction are infrequent (Unsworth, 2013a). As already
mentioned, agreement errors of this type have two potential sources, they may either be the result of
wrong gender assignment to the head noun (i.e. the child thinks that huis is common and thus, chooses
‘correctly’ the inflected form) or alternatively, they may arise due to an error in the syntactic computation
of agreement (i.e. the child knows that huis is neuter, but does not know the adjectival agreement rules).
Studies that investigate this issue indicate that most of these agreement errors result from wrong gender
assignment of the head noun rather than an inability to establish gender concord, which means that once
gender assignment is taken into account adjectival agreement is found to be target-like from early on
(Polisenska, 2010). Furthermore, it is argued that the close relation between accuracy scores on definite
determiners and adjectival inflection constitutes evidence for the activation of an abstract gender feature
in the child’s grammar (Blom et al., 2008; Polisenska, 2010).
Bilingual acquisition
Given that the acquisition of grammatical gender has been found to pose significant difficulties for Dutch
monolinguals, it is reasonable to assume that bilingual children encounter even larger problems in this
area. This prediction is confirmed by a series of studies on various bilingual populations, who show an
even more protracted course of gender acquisition compared to monolinguals (Blom et al., 2008;
Unsworth, 2007 & 2008) , with some even showing signs of fossilization (e.g. Hulk & Cornips, 2006a &
2006b). In other words, some of these studies indicate that the developmental trajectory of bilingual
children sometimes differs both quantitatively and qualitatively from what has been reported for
monolingual children.
Both 2L1 (i.e. simultaneous bilinguals) and L2 children have been found to show the same
overgeneralization pattern as monolinguals, namely the use of de in contexts that require the neuter
definite determiner, but unlike monolinguals they produce such errors well beyond the age of 6. For
example, Hulk & Cornips (2006b) investigated the acquisition of Dutch gender as indicated by the correct
use of definite determiners by a group of bilingual children (with age of onset <4 years) that were born in
ethnic communities in the Netherlands and had a variety of language backgrounds. The subjects were
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divided into three age groups (young: 3;0-3;10, middle: 4;11-5;2 and old: 9;3-10;5) and performance was
compared to a group of Dutch monolingual children matched for chronological age. Results revealed that
although both monolinguals and bilinguals showed a clear development in the correct use of de across age
groups, the bilinguals were delayed compared to the monolinguals (accuracy rates per age group for
monolinguals and bilinguals respectively: young group 59% vs. 26%; middle group 90% vs. 46% and old
group 92% vs. 76%). However, the same comparisons for the correct use of het showed a clear
development for monolinguals (from 7% in the young group to 77% in the middle and 90% in the old
group) but hardly any development for the bilinguals (from 7% in the young group to 15% in the middle
and 32% in the old group; with no significant differences between subsequent age groups but only
between the young and old one). Moreover, the lower performance of the bilinguals could not be ascribed
to cross-linguistic influence since children whose L1 employed grammatical gender did not significantly
differ from those whose L1 did not show gender distinctions of nouns (see Cornips et al., 2006 for similar
findings). Finally, it was argued that in addition to the quantitative difference between monolinguals and
bilinguals in the form of a delay in the acquisition of the correct use of het, the results seemed to indicate
also a qualitative difference between the grammars of the two populations in that the bilinguals appear to
fossilize in a stage where they continue to overgeneralize de.
Similar results were reported by Blom et al. (2008) for Moroccan child L2 learners of Dutch
whose age of onset was between 4 and 7. The child L2 learners were divided into two groups based on
their level of proficiency in Dutch. Both child L2 groups showed the same overgeneralization pattern (de
instead of het) as the monolinguals, but there were no statistically significant developments between the
two for either common or neuter nouns. However, a comparison with production data obtained in other
studies that included older bilingual groups suggested that bilingual children do show a gradual
development in the correct use of het, i.e. that they are delayed but do not fossilize (see Cornips, van der
Hoeck & Verwer, 2006 for similar conclusions with regard to determiner-noun agreement). Unsworth
(2008) tested English-speaking L2 learners of Dutch (children, preteens and adults) and found the same
overgeneralization pattern of de to neuter nouns. Moreover, although there were many L2 learners who
did not show target-like use of the definite determiner het even after lengthy exposure to Dutch, she did
find a handful of learners who used het with neuter nouns in a native-like fashion. Thus, it was suggested
that acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch is, in principal, possible for English-speaking learners of
Dutch (both children and adults), but that lengthy and extensive exposure may be a prerequisite to reach
native-levels in the correct use of het (Unsworth, 2008).
The observed differences between monolinguals and bilinguals are often accounted for in terms
of input-related factors, namely that the bilinguals receive quantitatively and sometimes even qualitatively
less input than the monolinguals (Cornips & Hulk, 2008; Unsworth, 2008). This is due to the assumption
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that input differences affect vocabulary acquisition and that the acquisition of gender-marking on
determiners involves the interface between the lexicon and morpho-syntax (Hulk & Cornips, 2006a). The
difference in amount of input the monolingual and bilingual children are exposed to is particularly crucial
in the case of Dutch, since there is very little evidence for neuter gender even in the input of monolingual
children which is reflected in the lengthy developmental path. Thus, it is possible that some bilinguals
simply do not receive a sufficient amount of input to fully acquire the neuter gender in Dutch. Moreover,
it is likely that the input of bilingual children raised in ethnic minorities or communities in the
Netherlands is also qualitatively different, i.e. the Dutch variety spoken by the members of the ethnic
community may differ from standard Dutch (Hulk & Cornips, 2006a).
In contrast to the above mentioned studies, Cornips & Hulk (2006) found evidence for
acceleration in the acquisition of Dutch gender by bilingual children from dialectal communities
compared to monolingual children. It was argued that the high degree of morpho-syntactic overlap
between the dialectal and standard Dutch determiner system allows for cross-linguistic influence in the
form of facilitation or positive transfer. This structural overlap was not present in the languages of the
bilinguals from the ethnic communities in Hulk & Cornips’ (2006a) study which might explain the
different findings for these two types of bilinguals (i.e. ethnic communities and dialectal communities)
(Hulk, 2007).
As far as the acquisition of gender marking on adjectives is concerned, bilingual children have
been found to show the same error profile as monolinguals, namely the overgeneralization of the schwaending where the bare adjective is required (e.g. Blom et al., 2008; Cornips et al., 2006). Cornips et al.
(2006) compared monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ performance on determiner-noun (Det-N) and adjectivenoun (Adj-N) agreement and found that both groups were more accurate on Det-N agreement. It was
argued that the difference in the accuracy rates for the two types of agreement can be accounted for in
terms of differences in the structural configurations between the two types of agreement 8. Collating the
data obtained by Blom et al. (2008), Hulk & Cornips (2006a) and Cornips et al. (2006) suggested that
there is a difference between monolingual and bilingual children with regard to the developmental pattern
across gender domains. While monolingual children showed a parallel development of Det-N and Adj-N
agreement, bilinguals showed a dissimilar development in the two gender domains, i.e. there was
development in Det-N agreement but not in Adj-N agreement (Blom et al., 2008). The results were
interpreted as evidence for the activation of an abstract gender feature in the monolinguals’ underlying
grammar, whereas this might not be the case for bilinguals.
8
“The determiner, being the head, needs to agree syntactically more than the adjective and the relative pronoun, bringing about
two morphological forms according to the gender of the noun.” (Cornips et al., 2006: 11).
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Unsworth (2013a) further investigated the acquisition of adjectival inflection in Dutch and its
relationship with Det-N agreement in a group of English-Dutch bilinguals aged between three and 17
years. In contrast to Blom et al. (2008), results revealed a close relationship between accuracy rates for
Det-N and Adj-N agreement for both monolinguals and bilinguals indicating that bilinguals too make use
of an abstract gender feature. Moreover, it was found that current amount of exposure and cumulative
length of exposure were both significant predictors for gender-marking on determiners, but only indirectly
for gender-marking on adjectives where the relationship is mediated by the accuracy rate on determiners.
In other words, amount of exposure (both current and cumulative) affect gender assignment (Det-N
agreement) more than gender agreement (adjectival inflection). This is to be expected if we assume that
gender assignment (Det-N) agreement has to be learned on an item-by-item basis, whereas gendermarking on adjectives involves the application of rules that make use of abstract grammatical features
(Unsworth, 2013a). Finally, Unsworth (2013b) investigated the source of adjectival agreement errors in
the same group of bilinguals and found that once gender assignment was taken into account accuracy
scores on Adj-N agreement increased, which means that a considerable amount of agreement errors on
adjectives result from wrong gender assignment to the head noun, rather than an inability to acquire the
adjectival agreement rule. Thus, it seems that bilinguals’ persistent difficulties are caused by the lexical
aspect of the Dutch gender system, rather than the morpho-syntactic (Unsworth, 2013b).
Unsworth (2013a) also investigated the relationship between judgment and production of
determiner-noun agreement and found that the performance patterns of the English-Dutch bilinguals were
very similar to the patterns previously attested Dutch monolinguals in Unsworth & Hulk (2010a). More
specifically, with common nouns children were more likely perform target-like on production, but not on
judgment, while for neuter nouns the reverse was found, namely that children were more likely to be on
target on judgment rather than on production. According to Unsworth & Hulk (2010a), the better
performance on production than on judgment for common nouns indicates a developmental stage where
children have become aware of the paradigmatic relationship between de and het which leads to
occasional errors in the judgment of common nouns, while in production, they are more likely to continue
to use de as a default.
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2.3 Gender in Greek
2.3.1 Descriptive notes
Modern Greek employs a tripartite gender system with the values ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ and ‘neuter’.
With regard to the gender assignment rules, semantics plays an important role in determining the gender
of animate nouns in Greek and consequently, the natural gender of nouns denoting humans usually
coincides with their grammatical gender such as andras masc (man) and gyneka fem (woman) or ɣios masc
(son) and kori fem (daughter). However, there are some exceptions to this rule, e.g. koritsi neut (girl) and as
noted by Ralli (2002), it is not the case that all remaining nouns are simply neuter which means that in
general, the gender values of inanimate nouns are semantically unpredictable.
In contrast to Dutch, Greek is a highly inflecting language and nouns typically carry an
inflectional suffix 9. However, these suffixes are ‘portmanteau’ morphemes in that they combine
information about number, gender and case. In addition to gender distinctions, Greek nouns can also be
classified according to their inflectional paradigms. Crucially though, there is no one-to-one
correspondence between the three gender values and the inflectional paradigms they display, leading to a
considerable overlap between the two classification systems. To illustrate, the inflectional paradigm of
nouns ending in –os contains both masculine (e.g. tichos “wall”) and feminine nouns (e.g. isoδos
“entrance”), but at the same time each of the three gender classes shows considerable inflectional
variation (e.g. masculine and neuter each have over ten different inflectional paradigms 10), which means
that noun endings in Greek do not provide unambiguous cues to gender assignment. Nevertheless, it has
been argued that noun suffixes in Greek have a predictive value for gender, with some being more
predictive (and consequently less ambiguous) than others. This claim is supported by the empirical
finding that (most) noun endings constitute strong cues for gender assignment by native speakers
(Mastropavlou & Tsimpli, 2011). This means that as to formal rules to gender assignment, there are a
number of morphological and phonological regularities as indicated by the relatively strong correlation
between gender and inflectional class (Ralli, 2002), but at the same time there are many exceptions to
those rules, rendering the various endings more or less transparent, i.e. predictive of gender. Table 1 gives
an overview of the most common noun endings for each gender class in the nominative singular.
9
With the exception of some borrowings and loan words.
However, only a handful of these inflectional paradigms are productive, the others being obsolete or derived from Ancient
Greek.
10
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Table 4. Overview of the most common Greek noun suffixes in the nominative singular.
Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
most common
-ós/ -os
-á/ -a
-o
-i
common
-ís/ -is
-í/ -i
-ma
rather common
-ás/ -as
-es
-ús/ -us
rare
-os
-os
-u
-on
-as
Grammatical gender in Greek is determined by a combination of semantic and morphological
rules, but nevertheless, it has been argued that Greek nouns are not always intrinsically specified for a
particular gender. According to Ralli (2002), for a large number of Greek noun stems, gender constitutes
an intrinsic property in the sense that the gender value of those stems is neither related to morphological
nor semantic information, such that for those noun stems, the gender feature is fully specified, as in, for
example, kip masc -os ‘garden’. On the other hand, stems of nouns whose gender value is determined by
semantic features and/or morphological processes are underspecified for their gender value. For example,
noun stems that can take different endings such as aðerf-, may surface either as a masculine noun, e.g.
aðerf-os masc (brother) or as a feminine noun, e.g. aðerf-i fem (sister) and similarly, gat- which can take all
three genders depending on the semantic context (i.e. gat-a fem , gat-os masc and gat-i neut (female/male)
‘cat’). In addition, there is a group of nouns denoting human professions which are persistently
underspecified in that gender assignment is not resolved by means of semantic or morphological
information of the noun itself, e.g. jatr- from jatr-os masc/fem (male/female) ‘doctor’. For those nouns it is
argued that gender is determined at the phrasal level through agreement rather than at the lexical level
through semantic or formal assignment rules (see Ralli, 2002 for a more extensive discussion). The
crucial point here is that in contrast to Dutch, where gender assignment can be said to be a property of the
lexicon only, gender assignment of certain nouns in Greek involves also morphological rules and in some
cases even syntactic processes.
Grammatical gender in Greek is realized on all declinable nominal elements, including the noun
itself, both predicative and attributive adjectives, determiners, numerals, quantifiers and pronouns. Again
we will restrict our discussion to the Greek determiner system and adjectival inflectional paradigm.
Unlike Dutch, Greek shows gender distinctions not only on definite determiners in the singular, but also
in the plural and on indefinite determiners in the singular. Definite determiners in the singular take the
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forms o, i and to for masculine, feminine and neuter nouns respectively. Table 5 gives an overview of the
Greek determiner system.
Table 5. Overview of the Greek determiner system in the Nominative.
Definite
Indefinite
Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
Singular
o
i
to
enas
mia
ena
Plural
i
i
ta
-
-
-
As already mentioned Greek adjectives have to agree with the head noun in gender, number and
case. Similar to nouns, adjectives in Greek can be divided into different classes depending on their
inflectional paradigm. Although there are a number of different adjective classes, most adjectives in
Greek take the suffix –os for masculine, -i for feminine and –o for neuter nouns in the nominative
singular as illustrated in Table 6 below. Moreover, there are a handful of adjectives (mainly colour terms
that were borrowed from other languages), which are indeclinable, e.g. mov MASC/FEM/NEUT ‘purple’.
Table 6. Main inflectional paradigm of regular adjectives in Greek in the nominative case singular and plural.
Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
Singular
-os
-i
-o
Plural
-us
-es
-a
Examples (17) - (19) illustrate agreement in the noun phrase in Greek. Note that in contrast to
most Romance languages, attributive adjectives in Greek occur in pre-nominal position.
(17)
O
kal-os
anthrop-os
The- MASC
good- MASC
man- MASC
omorf-i
gynaik-a
‘The good man’
(18)
I
The- FEM
beautiful- FEM
woman- FEM
‘The beautiful woman’
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To
megal-o
vivli-o
The- NEUT
big- NEUT
book- NEUT
‘The big book’
To summarize, in Greek grammatical gender is marked consistently on all nominal elements,
including the noun itself. Moreover, there is a close relationship between gender and inflectional
morphology which means that Greek suffixes provide reliable cues to gender assignment of nouns. In
other words, the abundance of gender-marking and the high predictive values of inflectional suffixes in
Greek lead to a relatively high degree of transparency of the grammatical gender system.
2.3.2 Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Greek
Monolingual Acquisition
Studies on the monolingual acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek have shown that the system is
mastered early, that is at around age 3;6 to 4;0 (Tsimpli, 2003). In fact, gender has been found to be one
of the first grammatical features to be acquired in Greek (Stephany, 1995). Mastropavlou (2006) tested
children aged 3;0 to 3;7 on gender marking and agreement in the nominal domain and found that neuter
nouns were the least problematic suggesting that neuter is the unmarked form and consequently, bears a
default function (see Stephany, 1995 for similar results). Moreover, incorrect gender-marking on nouns
and errors in determiner-noun agreement occurred only in masculine contexts (2% - 10%), but again
performance was very high (>90% correct). Children were also tested on determiner-adjective-noun
agreement, which yielded slightly more errors than the Det-N task, but the difference was not statistically
significant. Comparing the three genders, again masculine nouns turned out to be the most problematic,
while errors with feminine nouns were very rare and with neuter non-existent. Finally children were also
tested on pseudo-nouns and results indicated that morpho-phonological cues on the noun’s suffix are used
by 5-year-olds, but not by 3-year-olds, i.e. they are not used in the early stages of gender production in
gender agreement contexts.
Bilingual Acquisition
Unsworth et al. (2011b) investigated the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek-English (and DutchEnglish) bilingual children on two production tasks 11. The children varied in their age of onset to Greek
(i.e. simultaneous bilinguals from birth vs. early successive bilinguals before the age of 4;0 vs. child L2
11
The two production tasks were the Story and the PDT tasks that were also used in the present study.
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learners after the age of 4;0) and the amount of input they were exposed to. Results showed that children
performed best on neuter nouns, followed by feminine and masculine and that they tend to overgeneralize
the neuter definite determiner to with masculine and feminine nouns. Moreover, for masculine and
feminine nouns, children did better with determiner-noun agreement in simple DPs (det-N) than in
complex DPs (det-adj-N). A regression analysis suggested that for masculine and feminine nouns, amount
of exposure and vocabulary score were significant predictor variables, while for neuter nouns, vocabulary
score was the only significant predictor variable. Group comparisons further revealed that there were no
significant differences between the simultaneous bilinguals and the Greek monolinguals who were both at
ceiling with all three genders. In contrast, the performance of the early successive and the L2 children
differed significantly from the simultaneous bilinguals (and the monolinguals) for masculine and feminine
nouns. For neuter nouns, the only significant between-group differences were between the L2 children
and all the other groups, but no differences were observed between the simultaneous bilinguals, the early
successive bilinguals and the monolinguals.
Having discussed the gender systems of the two languages under study here as well as the related
findings from research on the monolingual and bilingual acquisition thereof, the next section (3.1) will
introduce the specific research questions to be answered in the present study.
3 The Study
3.1 Background
In light of the above mentioned findings on the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch and in Greek,
a number of questions emerge. First, studies on the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender have yielded
controversial findings, with some populations showing signs of fossilization with regard to Det-N
agreement (Hulk & Cornips, 2006b) or alternatively, Adj-N agreement (Blom et al., 2008), other studies
reporting simply a ‘bilingual delay’ in the two domains (e.g. Unsworth, 2008 & 2013b), while yet others
have found evidence for acceleration effects in bi-dialectal bilinguals (Cornips & Hulk, 2006). To account
for these differences, researchers have proposed a number of factors that determine the rate of success or
failure in the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender (Cornips & Hulk, 2008). One of these factors relates
to the nature of the L1, and more specifically, the amount of overlap between the two gender systems of a
bilingual. Thus, for the bi-dialectal bilinguals in Cornips & Hulk’s (2006) study, it is argued that the two
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gender systems present a sufficient amount of overlap to allow for positive transfer from the bilinguals’
L1 (in this case the Dutch dialect), which would lead to an acceleration in the acquisition of neuter gender
in Dutch. In contrast, English-Dutch bilinguals have no gender instantiated in their other L1 (i.e. English)
and thus, no (positive) influence from English on the acquisition of Dutch gender is expected. Moreover,
studies that investigated bilinguals from a variety of L1 backgrounds have found no significant
differences in the performance on Dutch neuter nouns between children who have gender instantiated in
their other L1 from those whose L1 lacks grammatical gender distinctions (Cornips, van der Hoeck &
Verwer, 2006; Hulk & Cornips, 2006b). Similarly, the French-Dutch children in Hulk (2007) seem to
perform equally poorly on Dutch gender as the English-Dutch bilinguals in Unsworth (2008). Thus, it
seems that the presence or absence of grammatical gender in the other L1 of a bilingual is not a decisive
factor for the acquisition of Dutch gender. However, it is possible that what matters is not so much the
presence/absence of grammatical gender, but rather the way in which grammatical gender is marked in
those languages that do employ grammatical gender. For example, Eichler, Jansen & Kupisch (2012)
investigated the acquisition of determiner-noun agreement in a group of bilingual children acquiring
German together with a Romance language (Italian, Spanish or French) or two Romance languages (i.e.
Italian-French bilinguals). Results indicated that accuracy on gender assignment (as indicated by correctly
produced determiner-noun combinations) is highly influenced by the way gender is marked in the
language that is being acquired. Thus, similar to what has been found for monolinguals, the bilinguals had
more difficulties with acquiring the German gender system than the French system, while French caused
only slightly more problems than Italian and Spanish, which were the easiest to acquire. It was argued
that this ranking could be explained in terms of transparency of the various gender systems, with German
being the most opaque, followed by French, while Italian and Spanish present the most transparent
systems of the four languages (Eichler et al., 2012). Given that the way how gender is marked affects its
acquisition, it is possible that this factor may also play a role in the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender.
The first research question to be addressed is thus:
1. What are the effects of having a transparent gender system with extensive gender marking in
the L1 (other language) on the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender?
In order to address this question, the results of the Greek-Dutch bilinguals will be compared to those
obtained by Unsworth (2013b) for English-Dutch bilinguals, as well as to data from Italian-Dutch
bilinguals gathered by Algoe (2011), who both used the same experimental tasks. If the transparency of
the Greek gender system does indeed have an effect on the acquisition of Dutch gender, the bilinguals of
the present study should show a different performance pattern than the English-Dutch bilinguals since
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English does not have grammatical gender instantiated and their performance should be comparable to the
Dutch-Italian bilinguals given that similar to Greek, the gender system of Italian is argued to have a high
degree of transparency (i.e. consistent and largely unambiguous gender marking on nominal elements,
including the noun itself). However, the Greek and Italian gender systems also differ in several ways,
which could lead to possible qualitative and quantitative differences in the acquisitional path between the
two populations. For example, in Greek gender is not only intertwined with number as in Italian, but also
case. This factor has been argued to account for the later mastery of the German gender system compared
to the French system in Eichler et al. (2012). On the other hand, Italian has only two gender values, while
Greek makes a three-way gender distinction which could lead to enhanced gender awareness in Greek
children compared to Italian children. Other factors that may influence the acquisition of gender are the
amount of variation of nominal endings (high for Greek vs. little for Italian), the nature of the determiner
system (allomorphy of masculine determiners in Italian vs. no allomorphy in Greek) and the position of
the attributive adjectives (mostly post-nominal in Italian vs. prenominal in Greek).
The second question that remains open concerns the relationship between the two agreement types,
namely Det-N agreement and (Det-)Adj-N agreement. As to adjectival agreement in Dutch, Polisenska
(2010) found evidence that Dutch monolinguals’ persistent difficulties with gender arise from the lexical
aspect of the acquisition task, namely from gender assignment, rather than agreement. In fact, when
gender assignment was taken into account, monolinguals were found to be target-like on adjectival
agreement from much earlier on than has previously been suggested. Findings for bilinguals, however, are
more controversial. While Blom et al. (2008) investigated a group of Moroccan children aged 4;2-8;4
(mean age of onset 4;0) and found dissimilar developments for the two types of agreement when collating
her data with other studies (with Det-Adj-N showing signs of fossilization), Unsworth (2013a) found
evidence for parallel development of determiner and adjectival agreement in simultaneous English-Dutch
bilinguals, which was taken as evidence for the activation of an abstract gender feature in the children’s
grammar. Moreover, the data from the Dutch-Italian bilinguals in Algoe (2011) (same subjects as Canta,
2012) also indicate development with increasing proficiency for both agreement types and no observable
difference in accuracy rates between Det-N and Det-Adj-N agreement. In addition, the results in Algoe
(2011) suggested that proficiency in Dutch (as indicated by vocabulary score) better predicts accuracy
with neuter gender in bilingual children than chronological age. The second research question thus
concerns the relationship between the two types of agreement and their development with increasing
proficiency in Dutch, more specifically:
2. Do the Dutch-Greek bilinguals show (parallel) development for both types of agreement with
increasing proficiency in Dutch (as indicated by vocabulary scores)?
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The relationship between determiner-noun and adjectival agreement is further investigated in a
cross-linguistic comparison with findings from Dutch-Italian bilinguals. To elaborate, Canta (2012)
investigated gender agreement in Italian in a group of Dutch-Italian bilinguals aged 3;3-7;11 and found
lower accuracy scores for adjectival agreement than for determiner-Noun agreement (which was above
90% in both groups). Thus, Det-N agreement seems to be acquired earlier. Moreover, in terms of error
types, for the younger group (<5;6) the most frequent error type was Det-N-*Adj for both genders (e.g. la FEM
casa -FEM * nuovo -MASC , ‘the new house’) the same holds for the older children (>5;6) with regard to
masculine nouns but not for feminine nouns, where the most frequent error type was *Det-N-*Adj (e.g.
*il -MASC pecora -FEM *nero -MASC . This indicates that for both groups, adjectival agreement errors with
masculine nouns are due to a failure to maintain gender concord in ‘syntactically more complex’
environments. For feminine nouns, the two groups showed a different error pattern with older children’s
most frequent error being of the type *Det-N-*Adj (suggesting an underlying error in gender assignment),
while for the younger ones it is Det-N-*Adj. Finally, accuracy on masculine nouns does not improve from
the younger to the older group (probably a ceiling effect) while a clear improvement can be seen for
feminine nouns (from 55% to 84%). The following two questions are thus stated with regard to the Greek
data obtained from the Greek-Dutch bilinguals:
3. Do the Dutch-Greek bilinguals show different accuracy rates for Det-N agreement and DetAdj-N agreement in Greek?
4. What kind of agreement errors do the Dutch-Greek bilinguals commit in Greek?
Assuming that language-internal factors such as the nature of the two gender systems of a
bilingual child somehow has an impact on the acquisitional path of grammatical gender in the two
languages (see Cornips & Hulk, 2008 for a detailed discussion of the proposed factors for Dutch),
comparing performance patterns across bilingual populations can offer important insights into the specific
characteristics of the various bilingual groups and further indicate the relationship between the various
factors. For example, in Greek, the order of acquisition of the three genders is neuter, which is the
unmarked form and thus, assumes a default function, followed by feminine and finally, masculine gender,
which seems to be the most problematic. Mastropavlou (2006) has observed this pattern in Greek
monolinguals and similarly, Unsworth et al.’s (2012b) results showed that early successive English-Greek
bilinguals (age of onset between 1-4 years) and L2 children (age of onset between 4-10 years) performed
significantly better with feminine than neuter nouns and better with neuter than both feminine and
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masculine 12. As a consequence, the neut>fem>masc pattern seems to be a robust finding and as such it is
expected that the Greek-Dutch bilinguals show the same pattern, if not, this would suggest a possible
influence of the Dutch gender system on the acquisition of Greek gender. For Dutch, the
overgeneralization of de to neuter nouns and the –e ending to contexts that require a bare adjective has
frequently been attested in monolingual and early bilingual 13 populations. However, a number of studies
have also reported overgeneralization of het for some bilinguals, which suggests that this particular
tendency may indicate a qualitative difference between monolingual and bilingual acquisition or
alternatively they may point to differences between different kinds of bilingual groups. To shed further
light on these issues, the following questions are asked:
5. Do the Dutch-Greek bilinguals show the same overgeneralization and performance patterns
as previously attested in monolingual and early bilingual populations, namely
a. neut>fem>masc for Greek?
b.
and overgeneralization of de for Dutch?
The last question to be addressed in the present study concerns the relationship between
performance on production and knowledge tasks. The general assumption is that knowledge or
comprehension precedes production and as a result acquirers and learners typically do better on
knowledge or judgment than on production tasks. For Dutch, however, it has been found that while this
general advantage of knowledge over production holds for neuter nouns, it seems to be reversed for
common nouns, i.e. production is better than judgment. Moreover, this pattern has been observed in
monolinguals (Unsworth & Hulk, 2010a) as well as (English-Dutch) bilinguals (Unsworth, 2013a) and
has been related to a developmental stage in the acquisition of Dutch gender. The last question thus asks
whether this pattern also extends to other bilingual populations, namely Dutch-Greek bilinguals, more
specifically:
6. Do the Greek-Dutch bilinguals show an asymmetry between the performance on the
judgment tasks and the performance on the production tasks in the two languages and is this
asymmetry the same for the various genders (i.e. common and neuter in Dutch and masculine,
feminine and neuter in Greek)?
12
In contrast, no significant differences between the three genders were reported for the simultaneous bilinguals and the
monolinguals due to their ceiling-performance.
13
That is simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and early successive bilinguals with age of onset before 4;0.
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Having presented the various research questions, we will next turn to a discussion of the research
method, including background information about the participants, descriptions of the experimental
material and some notes on the coding and analysis of the responses.
3.2 Method
3.2.1 Participants
Children were recruited from a Greek Saturday School in Amstelveen, where they attend two and a half
hours of Greek language classes 14 every weekend. Information about the subjects’ language background,
exposure patterns and other input-related variables were gathered by means of a detailed parental
questionnaire (Unsworth, 2008). Participants consisted of 33 Dutch-Greek bilingual children aged 4;4 to
13;3 years. 19 children were born in the Netherlands and 14 were born in Greece. From the 14 children
that were born in Greece, 13 lived there for an extended time period (mean: 3;10 years, range: 0;4-7;0)
and one child lived in Germany for six and a half years before the family moved to the Netherlands. 21
were simultaneous bilinguals (i.e. exposed to both languages from birth) and the remaining 12 were early
successive bilinguals with Greek as their L1 and an average age of onset of exposure to Dutch of 4;0
years (range: 2;0-6;6). 19 of the children receive both Dutch and Greek input at home, i.e. most of them
are raised in a one-parent-one-language situation, although some parents report speaking both languages
to the children. For 12 of the children (mainly the successive bilinguals) Greek is spoken by both parents
at home and two of the children are exposed to Greek and English at home. For 18 of the children the
language that is spoken between the parents is Greek, while for 11 it is Dutch and for the remaining 4 it is
either English and Greek or English only. 14 of the children were reported to speak only Dutch with their
siblings, 9 speak only Greek and 11 speak both Greek and Dutch with their siblings. All the children
attended Dutch primary schools or daycare/preschool at the time of testing, except for one child who
attended an international school where English is the language of instruction and Dutch is taught as a
foreign language. A detailed overview of the participants and information regarding a number of input
variables that were extracted from the questionnaires is provided in Appendix A.
14
The Greek School hosts three educational levels, kindergarten, primary school and high-school.
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3.2.2 Materials
3.2.2.1 Background Measures
In addition to the experimental tasks described below, children were administered a vocabulary test in
each language. For Dutch, the PPVT-III-NL (L.M. Dunn, Dunn & Schlichting, 2005) was used, which is
a standardized test measuring receptive vocabulary. For Greek, children were tested on the vocabulary
section of the Diagnostic Verbal IQ test (henceforth DVIQ), which is a measure of productive vocabulary
knowledge developed by Stavrakaki & Tsimpli (2000). Unlike the PPVT-III-NL, the DVIQ is not fully
standardized up to the age ranges that were included in the present study and therefore, children were
grouped and compared based on their raw scores 15, while children’s Dutch vocabulary scores were
adjusted for age. The results of the two vocabulary measures were taken as a general indicator of
children’s overall proficiency level in the two languages.
3.2.2.2 Experimental Tasks
Dutch Tests
In order to assess children’s knowledge of grammatical gender-marking on definite determiners and
attributive adjectives in Dutch, two elicited production tasks and one grammaticality judgment task were
administered. The tasks that were used were taken from Unsworth et al. (2011b) and were part of a larger
project on early child bilingualism. There are two versions of the tests, one for children below 6 years,
which contains 12 target nouns (6 common and 6 neuter) and an version for children above 6 years that
included 18 target nouns (9 common and 9 neuter, see Appendix B for a complete list of the 18 target
nouns). Moreover, the tests were preceded by a number of practice items and were interspersed with
fillers that tested a different phenomenon and thus, will not be mentioned further.
In the first task, the Picture Description Task (henceforth PDT), children are presented with two
pictures (e.g. a yellow robot and a blue robot). Then one of the pictures is highlighted and children are
asked to name it using the prompt: “Look! Here we see two pictures. This is a…“ (“Kijk! Hier zie je twee
plaatjes. Dit is een…”), on which the child is required to response with an adjective-noun string, which in
the present example would be “yellow robot” (“gele robot”). Following the child’s response to the first
item, the second item gets highlighted and the experimenter continues by saying “And this is a…” (“En
dit is een…”) and the child is expected to answer with “blue robot” (“blauwe robot”). After that, a third
item (e.g. a ball) appears next to one of the two objects (e.g. the yellow robot) and the experimenter says:
15
The vocabulary section of the DVIQ consists of 27 items, so the maximum score is 27.
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“The ball is in front of…” (“De bal ligt voor…”), on which the child answers with “the yellow robot”
(“de gele robot”). Finally, a fourth item appears next to the other object (here the blue robot) followed by
the prompt: “And the finger points to…” (“En de finger wijst naar…”) and the child is required to answer
with “the blue robot” (“de blauwe robot”) (see also Figure 1 below). Thus, each noun is elicited four
times, twice in an adjective-noun string in the indefinite condition and twice in a determiner-adjectivenoun string in the definite condition. An illustration of a neuter test item is provided in Figure 1.
Exp: Dit is een…
Child: wit konijn
This is a…
Exp: De bal ligt voor…
The ball lies before…
white rabbit
Child: het grijze konijn
the grey rabbit
Exp: En dit is een…
And this is a…
Child: grijs konijn
grey rabbit
Exp: En de hond staat naast…Child: het witte konijn
And the dog stands next to…
the white rabbit
Figure 1: Example item from the PDT task. The target noun konijn takes het and thus, requires the bare adjective in the indefinite
condition (upper row), but the adjective has to be inflected with a schwa in the definite condition (second row).
The second elicited production task used in the study was a story task (STORY), where children
were asked to help the experimenter tell a story that is accompanied by pictures. The experimenter starts
to tell a story, e.g. about a boy who is having a birthday party and the presents he received, a bicycle a
robot and a guitar and the children are asked to name the presents as they appear on the screen. The story
then continues with another character appearing on the screen followed by a question such as “What does
Leo want to play with?” and the child is expected to answer “the guitar”, thus producing a determiner-
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noun string in a definite context for each of the 12 or 18 target nouns. Figure 2 below illustrates two
screens of one of the three stories that were used to elicit the determiner-noun strings in definite DPs.
Exp: Wat heeft Leo gekregen? Een…
What did Leo receive?
A…
C: robot [etc]
Exp: Waar wil Paul mee spelen?
robot [etc]
What does Paul want to play with?
C: de robot
the robot
Figure 2. Example of two screens from the STORY task, which was used to elicit each of the target nouns (here robot) together
with a definite determiner. The nouns are first elicited in an indefinite context (left picture) and then in a definite context (right
picture).
In addition to the two elicited production tasks, children were also administered a grammaticality
judgment task (GJT) that took the form of a forced choice task, where children have to decide between
congruent and incongruent determiner-noun combinations. The items are first introduced by the
experimenter using an indefinite determiner, such as “Here we see a window, a sheep and a key.” (“Hier
zien we een raam, een schaap en een sleutel”) 16. Following this, each item is presented individually and
two puppets appear, with one puppet naming the item with a congruent determiner-noun combination
(e.g. het- NEUT raam- NEUT ‘the window’) and the other one with an incongruent one (e.g. *de- COM raamNEUT
‘the window’). Children are then asked which puppet said it correctly (“Jij moet zeggen wie het goed
heft”). Correct responses were counterbalanced across the two puppets.
Thus, each of the 18 (or 12) target nouns was elicited multiple times and for each noun the
following responses were included for subsequent analysis:
•
1x in a determiner-noun string (STORY)
•
2x with an indefinite determiner in an adjective-noun string (PDT)
•
2x in a definite determiner-adjective-noun string (PDT)
•
1x as a determiner-noun string in a forced choice task (GJT)
16
Note that introducing the items in this way does not give away any gender cues since indefinite determiners in
Dutch do not show any gender distinction.
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Greek Tests
The set-up of the Greek tests was very similar to the Dutch one, namely two production tasks to elicit the
determiner-noun and determiner-adjective-nouns strings and a grammaticality judgment task were
children had to choose between a congruent and an incongruent determiner-noun combination. The Greek
tests were also taken from Unsworth et al. (2011b), but in contrast to the Dutch tests, there was only one
version for all children, regardless of their age. The number of target nouns that were tested was 18 (6
masculine, 6 feminine and 6 neuter) and for each gender, two different endings were used, -os and –as for
masculine, -a and –i for feminine and –o and –i for neuter (see Appendix C for a complete list of the
Greek target nouns). Moreover, each of the three tasks was preceded by a number of practice items.
In the Det-N task, the 18 target nouns are divided into 6 sets that contain one noun of each
gender. Children are presented with a set showing three target nouns and are first asked to name them.
Next, the experimenter asks a series of questions about the depicted objects (e.g. ‘What is brown?’),
thereby eliciting determiner-noun strings in definite contexts. An example of a test item is provided in
Figure 3.
Exp: Ti ine prasino?
What is green?
Child: o vatrachos
the- MASC frog- MASC
Exp: Ti echi mavri ura?
What has a black tail?
Child: i gata
the- FEM cat- FEM
Figure 3. Example of an experimental set of the Greek Det-N task that was used to elicit determiner-noun strings. Each set
consists of three target nouns, one for each gender.
The second production task (Det-Adj-N task) that was used was highly similar to the Det-N task.
Children are again presented with an experimental set that contains three different nouns (one of each
gender), but this time, there are two instances of each target noun in the picture. Crucially, the two
instances of a given target noun differ in some aspect, e.g. in terms of size or colour. Children are asked to
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name the three target nouns first to ensure that they are familiar with the items. Then the experimenter
asks again a series of questions, such as ”What is red?” and the children are required to answer with an
determiner-adjective-noun string (e.g. “The big fish”). Thus, each target noun is produced twice in this
task (e.g. the brown dog and the white dog). Figure 4 illustrates an experimental set of the Det-Adj-N
task.
Exp: Ti ine roz?
Child: I megali bala
What is pink?
The- FEM big- FEM ball- FEM
Exp: Ti ine kokkino?
What is red?
Child: To mikro milo
The- NEUT small- NEUT apple- NEUT
Figure 4. Example of an experimental set of the Greek Det-Adj-N task that was used to elicit determiner-adjective-noun strings.
Each set depicts two instances of one masculine, one feminine and one neuter noun, thereby eliciting each target noun twice in a
determiner-adjective-noun string.
Finally, the children were administered a grammaticality judgment task, where they had to choose
between congruent and incongruent determiner-noun combinations. The task was presented orally and
children had to tap the experimenter’s left or right hand depending on whether they judged the first or the
second determiner-noun combination as correct. The gender of the determiner in the incongruent pairs
was counterbalanced.
In sum, for each target noun four responses were elicited:
•
1x in a determiner-noun string in definite DPs
•
2x in a determiner-adjective-noun string in definite DPs
•
1x as a determiner-noun string in a forced choice task
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3.2.3 Procedure
The tests were carried out in two sessions, one in Dutch (approx. 45 min.) and one in Greek (approx. 30
min.). Each child was tested individually by a (near-) native speaker of Dutch/Greek at the Greek
Saturday School or at home. The Dutch session started with the vocabulary task followed by the PDT
task, the GJT and finally, the STORY task. The Greek tests were administered in the order: vocabulary
(DVIQ), Det-N task, Det-Adj-N task and GJT. The Dutch gender tasks were run on a computer in the
form of PowerPoint presentations, while for the Greek production tasks picture booklets were used. The
parental questionnaire was either completed in an interview session with one of the experimenters or by
the parents themselves at home.
3.2.4 Coding and analysis
Children’s responses were recorded and entered into lists after each session. For the analysis of the Dutch
production tasks, the following coding schemes were adopted:
Determiner-Noun agreement
i.
Correct responses: correct determiner and correct target noun (het neut huis neut ‘the house’)
ii.
Incorrect responses: incorrect determiner with correct target noun (*de com huis neut ‘the
house)
iii.
Excluded responses
Use of indefinite determiners (een huis neut ‘a house’)
Determiner omission (huis ‘house’)
No answer
Other (use of non-target nouns)
Adjective-Noun agreement
i.
Correct responses: correct adjectival inflection and correct target noun (een wit
konijn neut /het witte konijn neut ’a white/the white rabbit’)
ii.
Incorrect responses: incorrect adjectival inflection and correct target noun (een *witte
huis neut / het *klein huis neut ‘a white/the white house’)
iii.
Excluded responses
Adjective omission
No answer
Other (use of non-target nouns)
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For the analysis of the Greek production tasks, similar coding schemes were used. However,
given that Greek has a rich morphology, a couple of adjustments and decisions were made. For example,
in Dutch there is no overt gender marking on root nouns and thus, the choice of the determiner was taken
as indicative of the gender a child has assigned to a given target noun. In Greek, nouns do carry nominal
suffixes and are inflected not only for gender, but also for number and case. Thus, for Greek too the
choice of the determiner was taken to be indicative of the gender assigned to a particular noun. However,
case errors on determiners and/or nouns were scored as correct as long as the noun phrase (DP) was
marked for the correct gender. The use of diminutives was also scored as correct since they are generally
very frequently used in Greek. Moreover, cases were children produced target nouns, but in some nontarget (but still grammatically correct) form were scored as correct. This is the case for a number of multigendered root nouns (see section 2.3.1), for example if the target noun was i- FEM gata -FEM ‘the cat’, but
the child produced it in its neuter form to- NEUT gati- NEUT , it was scored as correct.
Determiner-Noun Agreement
i.
Correct responses: correct (definite/indefinite) determiner and correct target noun (i fem
papia fem ‘the duck’, ena neut vivlio neut ‘a book’)
ii.
Incorrect responses: incorrect (definite/indefinite) determiner and correct target noun
(*to neut skilos masc /skilo masc-ACC , *ena neut gata fem )
iii.
Excluded responses
Determiner omission
No answer
Other (use of non-target nouns and target-nouns in non-existing forms) (i *krana/ i *vrisa
target: i fem vrisi fem ‘the tap’, *to *karxari target: o masc karxarias masc )
For the Det-Adj-N task, the coding scheme was slightly different. Here, responses that contained
case errors on target nouns were coded separately (*Det-*Adj-*N) 17.
Determiner-Adjective-Noun Agreement
i.
Correct responses: correct determiner, correct adjective and correct target noun
ii.
Incorrect responses
*Det-*Adj-N
(to neut mikro neut bala fem ‘the small ball’)
*Det-*Adj-*N (to neut mikro neut elefanda masc-ACC ‘the small elephant’)
*Det-Adj-N
(o masc megalo neut vivlio neut ‘the big book’)
Det-*Adj-N
(o masc kitrino neut ilios masc ‘the yellow sun’)
17
Note that here, the * in front of the noun indicates a case error rather than a non-target noun, since responses containing nontarget nouns were excluded from the analysis, i.e. coded as ‘other’.
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Evelyn Egger
Excluded responses
Determiner omission
Adjective omission
Use of indeclinable adjective
No answer
Other (use of non-target nouns or target nouns in non-existing forms)
3.3 Results
3.3.1 Background measures
Children were first administered a vocabulary test that was used as an indicator of the children’s overall
language proficiency. Children were then grouped according to their vocabulary scores to see whether
and how the bilinguals ‘develop’ with increasing language proficiency. There are several reasons why the
children were grouped according to their vocabulary scores in the two languages and not some other
variable like age. First, there is a vast amount of variability in the amount of input these bilinguals receive
in the two languages both currently and in the past. For example, some children speak Greek at home,
while for others the only source of Greek input is the Saturday school. Similarly, for some children the
only place where they are exposed to Dutch is school, while others speak almost exclusively Dutch both
in school and at home. These differences in amount of input and exposure are likely to be attenuated over
the years, which in turn, could skew the results. Second, Unsworth et al. (2011b) found that vocabulary
size was the second best predictor variable for bilingual children’s performance on grammatical gender in
both Greek and Dutch (the best being amount of input/exposure). Moreover, the vocabulary groupings
facilitate subsequent comparisons with data obtained by Algoe (2011), who used the same experimental
materials and also found that vocabulary scores were a good indicator of bilinguals’ accuracy rates on the
gender tasks. Although the groupings based on vocabulary scores may inform us about the relationship
between acquisition of gender and language proficiency, it leaves out other factors such as amount of
exposure that have been shown to affect gender acquisition in the two languages (Unsworth et al., 2011b).
The Dutch vocabulary test that was used was the PPVT-III-NL, which is a measure of receptive
vocabulary and is fully standardized. The average score (standard score) on the PPVT-III-NL is 100, with
85 and 115 representing the cut-off scores that lie within one standard deviation (SD) from the mean.
Thus, the experimental subjects were grouped according to their vocabulary scores (WBQ), namely group
A: WBQ <85, group B: WBQ 85-100, group C: WBQ 101-115 and group D: WBQ >115. Table 7 gives
an overview of the groupings for the analyses of the Dutch data. Scores across groups range from 79 to
132 and the mean score is 99. It should be noted that groups A and C are comparable in age, as are groups
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B and D. Moreover, there are no big differences between the groups in terms of the age ranges that are
encompassed in each.
Table 7. Overview of Dutch groupings based on WBQ scores.
Group
A
WBQ
Number of
Average age
(mean)
participants
(range)
<85
6
9;1
(80.5)
B
85-100
(5;2-11;8)
14
(93.5)
C
101-115
(5;8-12;11)
8
(107.5)
D
>115
(123)
8;5
9;5
(4;4-13;3)
5
8;4
(5;11-11;5)
To measure children’s general proficiency in Greek, the vocabulary section of the DVIQ was
used. The test assesses productive vocabulary knowledge and consists of 27 items. As in Dutch, for the
Greek analyses too, participants were divided into groups according to their vocabulary scores (DVIQ
scores). Since the Greek vocabulary test is not fully standardized, raw scores were used, which ranged
from 4 to 21 with an average of 13. It should be noted that the relatively low overall scores are the result
of a very strict scoring procedure, where only the target answers that were provided by the test developers
were accepted and synonymous expressions and answers were scored as incorrect. Given that there are no
standard scores for the DVIQ, participants were evenly distributed across three groups, that is group A:
DVIQ <11, group B: DVIQ 11-16 and group C: DVIQ >16. An overview of the groupings for the
analyses of the Greek data is provided in Table 8. Again the three groups include similar age ranges,
however, group A is on average more than two years younger than group B, and group B is slightly older
than group C.
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Table 8. Overview of Greek groupings based on DVIQ scores.
Group
A
DVIQ
Number of
Average age
(mean)
participants
(range)
<11
11
7;5
(8)
B
11-16
(4;4-11;4)
11
(13)
C
>16
(18.5)
9;10
(5;2-12;8)
11
9;0
(5;11-12;8)
Thus, for the analyses of both data sets, children were grouped according to their proficiency
level. For Dutch, group A represents the children that scored below average on the standardized test and
are thus the least proficient. Groups B and C are within the normal range of standard scores for
monolinguals and group D are above average and therefore the most advanced in terms of overall
proficiency. For Greek, there was one group less, i.e. three groups, with group A again representing the
least advanced and group C the most proficient. However, since the Greek vocabulary test was not fully
standardized, the raw scores that were used as a measure of overall proficiency do not take into account
the children’s chronological age.
3.3.2 Dutch Production Tasks
STORY Task (Det-N)
The story task was used to elicit definite determiners together with the 18 target nouns. Table 9 below,
summarizes the group results. Accuracy on determiner-noun agreement was calculated in terms of the
average number/percentage of nouns in definite noun phrases (DPs) produced with the target
determiner 18. Excluded responses are given as the average number for each type of invalid responses
divided by the total number of responses. Results show that children perform better on common nouns
than on neuter nouns. All groups score high on common nouns (above 96%) with the exception of group
D who only scores 89% correct. The lower accuracy rate for common nouns in group D is caused by two
children (twins) who show a tendency to overgeneralize the common definite determiner de to neuter
nouns. As to the correct use of the neuter determiner het, there seems to be a gradual improvement from
group B to C and from C to D, reaching 85% correct responses in the last group. Moreover, group A
18
i.e. The number of nouns produced with the target definite determiner (de for common nouns or het for neuter nouns) divided
by the total number of nouns of the same gender produced with either of these determiners.
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scores almost 10% higher than group B on neuter nouns, which is unexpected. All groups show
overgeneralization of de to neuter nouns, however there is a gradual decrease of this error type from
group B to C and from C to D, with group A again lying between groups B and C. Another thing to note
is the high number of excluded responses for groups A, B, and C. In all three groups, the total number of
excluded items is higher for neuter than for common nouns. There are only three instances where children
used an indefinite determiner with common nouns, while indefinite determiners with neuter nouns
occurred more frequently (12 times in total). Group B omitted determiners quite frequently and more so
than group C, while there were no determiner omissions for groups A and D. Group B also has the highest
percentage of ‘no answer’ and ‘other’ responses.
Table 9. Group results for the Story Task in both percentages and absolute numbers for the various types of responses.
Group
Correct
Incorrect
Indefinite
Determiner
responses
responses
determiner
omission
No answer
Other
Total
excluded
Responses
A
Common
n=6
Neuter
B
Common
n=14
Neuter
C
Common
n=8
Neuter
D
Common
n=5
Neuter
96.2%
3.8%
1.9%
1.9%
51/53
2/53
1/54
1/54
62.2%
37.8%
11.1%
3.7%
1.9%
16.7%
28/45
17/45
6/54
2/54
1/54
9/54
96.4%
3.6%
0.8%
7.9%
2.4%
11.1%
108/112
4/112
1/126
10/126
3/126
14/126
52.9%
47.1%
2.4%
5.6%
7.1%
2.4%
17.5%
55/104
49/104
3/126
7/126
9/126
3/126
22/126
100%
2.8%
1.4%
1.4%
5.6%
68/68
2/72
1/72
1/72
4/72
79.7%
20.3%
4.2%
4.2%
1.4%
1.4%
11.2%
51/64
13/64
3/72
3/72
1/72
1/72
8/72
88.9%
11.1%
40/45
5/45
84.4%
15.6%
38/45
7/45
Given the relatively high numbers of excluded responses, it is interesting to see the proportions of
these three types of responses per gender and group in order to have a more complete picture of the
performance patterns. The percentages of correct, incorrect and excluded responses for each group and
41
MA Thesis 2013
Evelyn Egger
gender condition are thus further illustrated in Figure 5. Group B has the highest number of excluded and
incorrect responses, followed by group A and C, while group D has no excluded responses. Group D
produced more incorrect responses with common nouns than group A and B, while group C made no
mistakes in this gender condition. Figure 5 also shows that when invalid responses are taken into account,
group D still scores nearly 15% higher on neuter nouns than group C and group C around 25% higher
than group B. Moreover, group B scores around 10% lower on neuter nouns than group A, while the
number of excluded responses is similar for the two groups. Overall, both Table 9 and Figure 5 indicate
that group B performed worse on this task than group A which suggests that at least for the less proficient
learners, accuracy on determiner-noun agreement in Dutch was affected by some other factor(s) apart
from vocabulary score.
100%
80%
60%
40%
excluded responses
20%
incorrect responses
correct responses
A
B
C
Neuter
Common
Neuter
Common
Neuter
common
Neuter
Common
0%
D
Figure 5. Proportions of correct, incorrect and excluded responses per group and gender condition (in percentages).
PDT Task (Det-Adj-N)
The picture description task (PDT) was used to elicit adjectives with definite determiners and adjectives
in indefinite contexts. The group results are presented in Table 10. Accuracy scores for determiner-noun
agreement were calculated in the same way as in the Story task (i.e. by dividing the number of nouns
produced with the target definite determiner by the total number of nouns of the same gender produced
with either de or het). Similarly, accuracy scores for adjective-noun agreement were calculated by
dividing the number of responses containing target adjectival inflection (i.e. in indefinite DPs, bare
adjectives with neuter nouns and in definite DPs inflected adjectives with nouns of either gender) by the
total number of responses containing adjectives either inflected or bare. With regard to the use of definite
determiners, all groups perform better on common than on neuter nouns, except group D, who scores
slightly higher on het than on de. Group A and C perform target-like with the definite determiner de
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MA Thesis 2013
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(>90%), while groups B and D seem to use het instead of de quite often (B: 11.2%, D: 16.7%). In fact
there are four children who overgeneralize het to de in at least 25% of the cases and two more who
produce this kind of error in about 10% of the elicited responses. The use of the neuter definite determiner
het seems to improve with increasing proficiency (as indicated by the vocabulary scores), with group A
scoring 44%, group B 52%, group C 78.8% and group D reaching 84.5% correct. However, the relatively
high score in group D might be influenced by two children who show a tendency to overgeneralize het.
When these two children are excluded from the group average, performance drops to 72.3%, which is
slightly lower than group C. However, this also leaves group D with only three participants, two of which
score 100% and one who uses het with neuter nouns in only 17% of the cases.
The use of the inflected adjective in definite contexts does not seem to cause significant problems
for any of the four groups, B, C, and D score above 95% correct with both neuter and common nouns and
group A also performs above 93%. Moreover, 13 out of the 14 errors with adjectives in definite contexts
in group A were produced by one child, as were the 5 errors in group C. As to the use of adjectives in
indefinite contexts, all groups perform better with common nouns than with neuter nouns. The use of the
inflected adjective with common nouns is target-like in groups B, C and D (>97%). The relatively lower
scores of group A (88.2%) are caused by one child who consistently produces bare adjectives in indefinite
contexts with both common and neuter nouns. The same child is also partly responsible for the higher
scores of group A in the indefinite neuter condition, compared to group B. Leaving group A aside, the use
of bare adjectives in indefinite contexts clearly improves from group B to C and from C to D, with the
most advanced group reaching 93% correct.
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Table 10. Group results for the Picture Description Task (PDT).
Group
Indefinite
-e
A
common
n=6
neuter
B
common
n=14
neuter
C
common
n=8
neuter
D
common
n=5
neuter
Definite
-∅
de
het
-e
-∅
88.2%
11.8%
100%
0%
93.1%
6.9%
90/102
12/102
102/102
0/102
95/102
7/102
36.3%
63.7%
56.0%
44.0%
93.1%
6.9%
37/102
65/102
56/100
44/100
95/102
7/102
97.8%
2.2%
88.8%
11.2%
100%
0%
221/226
5/226
198/223
25/223
226/226
0/226
50.4%
49.6%
48.0%
52.0%
98.2%
1.8%
114/226
112/226
107/223
116/223
222/226
4/226
100%
0%
97.0%
3.0%
100%
0%
138/138
0/138
130/134
4/134
138/138
0/138
21.0%
79.0%
21.2%
78.8%
96.4%
3.6%
29/138
109/138
29/137
108/137
132/137
5/137
100%
0%
83.3%
16.7%
95.8%
4.2%
72/72
0/72
60/72
12/72
69/72
3/72
6.9%
93.1%
15.5%
84.5%
97.2%
2.8%
5/72
67/72
11/71
60/71
69/71
2/71
Overall, there were less invalid responses for the PDT than the Story task. Moreover, definite
determiners yielded most omissions and ‘no answer’ responses. An overview of the number and types of
excluded responses per group and condition is provided in Table 11. There were much less determiner
omissions in the PDT task compared to the Story task, and children did not use indefinite determiners
instead of definite determiners in the definite condition in PDT.
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MA Thesis 2013
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Table 11. Overview of numbers and percentages of excluded responses from the PDT.
Group
Indefinite -
Definite -
Definite -
Total
adjectives
determiners
adjectives
excluded
omission
A
common
n=6
neuter
B
common
n=14
neuter
C
no answer
neuter
no answer
responses
2.0%
2.0%
2/102
2/102
0.9%
0.9%
4.0%
2/228
3/228
2/228
2/228
9/228
0.9%
1.3%
0.9%
0.9%
4.0%
2/228
3/228
2/228
2/228
9/228
0.7%
2.2%
2.9%
1/138
3/138
4/138
neuter
n=5
omission
1.3%
n=8
common
no answer
0.9%
common
D
omission
0.7%
0.7%
1.5%
1/138
1/138
2/138
1.4%
1.4%
2.8%
1/72
1/72
2/72
3.3.3 Dutch Knowledge Task (GJT)
The knowledge task (GJT) took the form of a forced choice task, where children had to choose
between congruent and incongruent determiner-noun strings. Accuracy scores were calculated by dividing
the number of nouns for which the child chose the correct determiner-noun combination by the total
number of nouns of the same gender. The group results are summarized in Table 12. The picture is
surprising since children seem to perform better on neuter than on common nouns. Similar to the Story
task, the high scores on neuter nouns and low scores on common nouns for group D can again be ascribed
to two children (the twins already mentioned above), who show the same tendency to overgeneralize het
to common nouns also in the knowledge task. Group C is the only one who performs better on common
than neuter nouns and reaches high scores for both (>91%). The results of group A and B are more
difficult to interpret. In group B there seems to be a handful of children who show chance performance,
but at the same time four of the children in this group score 100% correct in both conditions. The picture
for group A is however, different. In this group there are two children, who score above 90% in both
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MA Thesis 2013
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conditions and one who seems to show chance performance, while the remaining three score considerably
higher with neuter than with common nouns.
Table 12. Group results (percentages correct) for the knowledge task (GJT).
Group
Common
Neuter
Both
A
64.7%
80.4%
72.6%
n=6
33/51
41/51
74/102
B
67.5%
78.1%
72.8%
n=14
77/114
89/114
166/228
C
97.1%
91.3%
94.2%
n=8
67/69
63/69
130/138
D
69.4%
94.4%
81.9%
n=5
25/36
34/36
59/72
3.3.4 Comparisons
Comparison with Unsworth (2013a) and Algoe (2011)
In order to compare the performance patterns of the Dutch-Greek bilinguals with those of the EnglishDutch bilinguals of Unsworth’s (2013a) study, the group results of the latter are replicated in Table 13 19.
As for adjective-noun agreement in indefinite contexts, both the English-Dutch and the Greek-Dutch
bilinguals perform better with common than neuter nouns and both populations show gradual
improvement with neuter nouns (with increasing age for the English-Dutch and vocabulary for the GreekDutch 20), while accuracy scores for common nouns are very high for all groups (>93% except for the 6year-olds in Unsworth and group A in the present study who score around 88%). With regard to definite
determiners, production is again better with common than with neuter nouns for both the English-Dutch
and the Greek-Dutch bilinguals and both show (more or less) gradual improvement for neuter nouns with
increasing age/vocabulary, while accuracy scores for common nouns are generally high. However, the
English-Dutch bilinguals appear to commit very few errors where they use het instead of de (max. 3.5%
for the 6-year-olds), whereas the Greek-Dutch bilinguals of the present study produced such errors much
more frequently (11% for group B, 3% for group C and 17% for group D, see Table 10). There are at least
19
It should be kept in mind though, that the comparison is not entirely straight-forward, since the bilinguals in Unsworth’s study
were grouped according to their chronological age, while the participants of the present study were divided on the basis of their
vocabulary scores.
20
At least from group B to C and C to D.
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6 Greek-Dutch bilinguals who show a tendency to overgeneralize het to common nouns (i.e. in more than
14% of the cases). When it comes to judging the grammaticality of determiner-noun combinations, there
seems to be a difference between Unsworth’s bilinguals and the children of the present study. As can be
seen in Table 13, the English-Dutch bilinguals perform again better with common than with neuter nouns,
while this is not necessarily the case for the Greek-Dutch bilinguals (see Table 12). For the bilinguals of
the present study all groups, seem to perform better with neuter than with common nouns, except group C
who is near target-like in both gender conditions 21.
Table 13. Group results of the English-Dutch bilinguals in Unsworth (2013a) for the production of adjectives in indefinite
contexts (PDT) and determiners in definite contexts (PDT) as well as accuracy scores for the GJT with congruent and
incongruent determiner-noun combinations.
Indef. + Adjective
Def. + Determiner- Production
Common
Neuter
Common
Neuter
4 year olds
93.6%
20.2%
96.7%
10.2%
5 year olds
96.6%
27.0%
99.6%
6 year olds
88.5%
52.6%
7 year olds
98.0%
8 year olds
Def. + Determiner- Judgment
Common
neuter
21.2%
77.8%
56.1%
96.5%
42.1%
85.6%
72.6%
50.0%
98.1%
69.3%
92.1%
83.3%
94.8%
60.7%
97.7%
65.1%
96.3%
83.0%
9 year olds
100%
81.1%
98.6%
87.0%
100%
93.1%
10 year olds
99.5%
80.3%
98.7%
74.4%
96.0%
91.9%
11 year olds
97.0%
58.3%
96.8%
55.6%
90.7%
83.3%
12 & 13 year olds
100%
74.2%
98.0%
80.8%
95.7%
90.9%
14 to 17 year olds
100%
52.5%
96.6%
64.2%
85.9%
85.9%
In sum, the two bilingual populations show largely similar performance patterns across tasks and
conditions. However, the there are also differences between the two population in that the Greek-Dutch
bilinguals show a tendency to overgeneralize het to contexts that require the common definite determiner.
This is crucial since the overgeneralization of het is an error that monolinguals hardly ever make 22 and
has not been consistently found in bilingual populations either 23. Another difference between the two
populations is the Greek-Dutch bilinguals’ better performance with neuter than with common nouns in the
GJT task. This finding is highly unusual given that (as far as we know) no study so far has reported better
21
It should be noted that the group averages for this task might be misleading, since there were a handful of children who showed
chance-level performance and some had a (more or less clear) tendency to overgeneralize het. Moreover, in all groups there were
children who performed target-like in both gender conditions.
22
In monolinguals overgeneralization of het is found only occasionally in very advanced stages of gender acquisition.
23
E.g. Blom et al. (2008) report overgeneralization of het for all tested groups (monolinguals, L2 children and L2 adults), while
other studies have not found such a tendency (e.g. Unsworth, 2013a; Unsworth et al., 2011b; Hulk & Cornips, 2006a).
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MA Thesis 2013
Evelyn Egger
performance in neuter than in common conditions in any task. These differences between the EnglishDutch and the Greek-Dutch bilinguals suggest that the nature of the gender system of the ‘other L1’ has
an influence on the acquisition of Dutch gender. Unfortunately, a more direct comparison between the
two experimental populations is difficult due to the different grouping criteria that were employed 24.
A comparison with the Italian-Dutch bilinguals in Algoe (2011) is provided in Table 14 25. Again
the general performance pattern of the two populations seems to be highly similar. Both perform better on
common than on neuter nouns in both agreement types (i.e. determiner-noun and adjective-noun
agreement) and both show higher accuracy with neuter nouns as a function of increasing vocabulary
scores 26. Unlike the Greek-Dutch bilinguals however, the Italian-Dutch children in Algoe did hardly
produce errors of the type het for de (only 3% in group C), similar to the English-Dutch bilinguals in
Unsworth (2013a) suggesting a qualitative difference between the Italian-Dutch and the Greek-Dutch
bilinguals as well. Finally, comparing the performance with adjectival inflection in the definite condition
between the two kinds of bilinguals, another interesting difference emerges. The Italian-Dutch bilinguals
perform at ceiling with common nouns while performance on neuter nouns seems to decrease from group
A to B, B to C and C to D. In contrast, all Greek-Dutch bilinguals perform (near) target-like in both
gender conditions (>93%) 27. Comparing the actual accuracy scores between the two populations, it
appears that with regard to neuter nouns, the Greek-Dutch children of the present study did consistently
better than the Italian-Dutch bilinguals in Algoe (2011) (except group D on determiner-noun agreement)
and the Italian-Dutch bilinguals generally did better on common nouns than the Greek-Dutch children,
although these differences on common nouns were much smaller due to the high performance levels.
24
The age distribution of the Greek-Dutch bilinguals is quite uneven and grouping them according to chronological age would
leave many groups with only one or two participants. Moreover, the group averages for the vocabulary measure (PPVT-III-NL)
of the English-Dutch children in Unsworth lie between 103-117, while there seems to be more variation in the Greek-Dutch
bilinguals, which means that only group C and some children of group B and D of the present study would match the vocabulary
scores of Unsworth’s participants.
25
Here it should be kept in mind that although the two populations are grouped on the same criteria, i.e. vocabulary score, they
differ considerably in terms of age. For the Italian-Dutch bilinguals the average ages are 5;2 for group A, 5;10 for group B, 6;10
for group C and 5;7 for group D, while the average age of the participants of the present study was considerably older, i.e. 9;1 for
group A, 8;5 for group B, 9;5 for group C and 8;4 for group D.
26
With the exception of groups B who in both studies score lower than the respective groups A.
27
The results of the Story task are not discussed here, since the picture is very similar to the results for the determiner-noun
combinations in the PDT task. Children in both studies perform better on common than on neuter and overall slightly better with
in the Story task than in the PDT with this type of agreement. Moreover, only the Greek-Dutch bilinguals show a tendency to
overgeneralize het to contexts that require de (albeit to a lesser degree than in the PDT task).
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Table 14. Comparison of percentages correct for the PDT between the Dutch-Greek bilinguals of the present study and the
Dutch-Italian bilinguals in Algoe’s (2012) study.
Group
A
Indefinite + Adj.
common
neuter
B
common
neuter
C
common
neuter
D
common
neuter
Definite determiner
Definite + Adj.
Greek
Italian
Greek
Italian
Greek
Italian
88.2%
100%
100%
100%
93.1%
100%
90/102
12/12
102/102
12/12
95/102
12/12
63.7%
33.3%
44.0%
16.6%
93.1%
91.6%
65/102
4/12
44/100
2/12
95/102
11/12
97.8%
100%
88.8%
100%
100%
100%
221/226
90/90
198/223
90/90
226/226
90/90
49.6%
24%
52.0%
28%
98.2%
87%
112/226
25/90
116/223
28/90
222/226
76/90
100%
96%
97.0%
97%
100%
98%
138/138
137/144
130/134
139/144
138/138
141/144
79.0%
40%
78.8%
35%
96.4%
80%
109/138
56/144
108/137
50/144
132/137
114/144
100%
100%
83.3%
100%
95.8%
100%
72/72
18/18
60/72
18/18
69/72
18/18
93.1%
78%
84.5%
100%
97.2%
50%
67/72
14/18
60/71
18/18
69/71
9/18
Comparison determiner-noun agreement vs. adjective-noun agreement
Accuracy scores for determiner-noun agreement and adjective-noun agreement are plotted against each
other in Figure 6. For adjectives, only the responses in the indefinite condition were taken into
consideration and accuracy scores were again calculated by dividing the number of responses with target
adjectival inflection by the total number of responses for nouns of the same gender that contained an
adjective (regardless of whether it is inflected or not). For the definite determiners, the plots in Figure 6
represent the average percentage correct of both production tasks for de and het respectively. For common
nouns, determiner-noun agreement is target-like in all groups and hence there is no notable improvement
across groups, but interestingly, as noted above, there is a drop in accuracy between group C and D (from
98.4% to 84.4%). For adjectives with common nouns, there is improvement from group A to B, who
reaches target-like performance as do groups C and D (>97%). Group A performs better on determinernoun agreement than on adjectival agreement, while the reverse is true for group D. Groups B and C do
49
MA Thesis 2013
Evelyn Egger
not show a difference between accuracy scores in determiner-noun and adjective-noun agreement. As to
neuter nouns, group A and D seem to perform better on adjectival agreement than on determiner-noun
agreement, but this difference does not hold for groups B and C who show similar accuracy rates for the
two types of agreement. Finally, accuracy scores for neuter nouns seem to improve more or less in
parallel across groups. In other words, results point to a close relationship between accuracy rates on
determiner-noun and adjectival agreement for neuter nouns (at least for groups B, C and D).
100.0%
% correct
80.0%
60.0%
40.0%
20.0%
0.0%
A
B
C
D
de
98.1%
93.0%
98.4%
84.4%
het
48.1%
48.6%
79.9%
83.1%
-e
83.3%
97.6%
100.0%
100.0%
-Ø
65.7%
49.2%
77.4%
91.7%
Figure 6. Accuracy scores for determiner-noun and adjective-noun agreement for both gender conditions.
Comparison production tasks vs. knowledge tasks
The last comparison concerns the performance on determiner-noun agreement in the production
and judgment tasks (since the GJT only tested determiner-noun combinations). Table 15 gives the average
percentages of correct determiner-noun agreement of the two production tasks and the average scores on
the judgment task. For common nouns, it seems that all groups do better with production than with
judgment and the difference is particularly big for groups A and B (over 30%) as well as D (over 20%),
while for group C the difference is negligible. The reverse pattern holds for neuter nouns, here judgment
appears to be better than production, however the discrepancy also gets smaller with increasing
vocabulary scores, from over 30% for group A to 25% in group B and about 10% in groups C and D.
Thus, the findings are in line with Unsworth & Hulk (2010a) and Unsworth (2013a) who have reported
the same kind of asymmetries between the two genders and tasks. However, for the monolinguals in
Unsworth & Hulk (2010a) this asymmetry was only found for the more advanced group (group II), but
not for the less advanced children (group I) and was argued to reflect a developmental stage in the
acquisition of Dutch gender where children become aware of the paradigmatic relationship between de
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MA Thesis 2013
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and het which leads them to occasionally assign neuter gender to common nouns in the judgment task. In
contrast, in the present study all groups showed this performance pattern (even the less advanced groups)
suggesting that the Greek-Dutch bilinguals reach this developmental stage much earlier than
monolinguals and/or remain longer in this particular stage.
Table 15. Average percentage correct for determiner-noun agreement in the two production tasks and the average scores for the
judgment task.
Group
de
Production
het
Judgment
Production
Judgment
A
98.1%
63.0%
48.1%
80.6%
B
93.0%
59.9%
48.6%
72.2%
C
98.4%
97.2%
79.9%
91.0%
D
84.4%
63.3%
83.1
93.3%
3.3.4 Greek Production Tasks
Det-N Task
The Det-N task was used to elicit determiner-noun strings for the 18 target nouns. We will first consider
all types of responses for each gender seperately. The group results for neuter nouns are presented in
Table 16. Children did not produce any ungrammatical determiner-noun strings for neuter nouns and all
groups produced diminutives in this condition. However, they hardly used the indefinite determiner
regardless of whether they produced a root noun or a diminutive. To note is the high number of excluded
responses, which reaches over 35% in group A, 7% in group B and almost 14% in group C. Moreover, all
but two of the excluded responses are determiner omissions, which are particularly frequent in group A
(which is also the youngest group), where they constitute almost 35% of the total responses and group C
omitted determiners more frequently than group B. The determiner omissions in group A were produced
by six children, in group B all omissions are due to one child and in group C there were three children that
omitted determiners in this task.
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Table 16. Group results in numbers and percentages for the various types of responses for neuter nouns in the Det-N task.
Correct responses
definite
A
B
C
def + dim
Total
indef
indef + dim
Excluded responses
omiss
no answer
Total
other
48%
10.7%
2.7%
1.3%
62.7%
34.7%
2.7%
37.3%
36/75
8/75
2/75
1/75
47/75
26/75
2/75
28/75
89.0%
4.1%
93.1%
6.9%
6.9%
65/73
3/73
68/73
5/73
5/73
73.8%
8.8%
3.6%
86.2%
13.8%
13.8%
59/80
7/80
3/80
69/80
11/80
11/80
Unlike neuter nouns, masculine nouns yielded a relatively high number of incorrect responses.
The numbers and percentages for the various kinds of responses for masculine nouns are presented in
Table 17. From the total number of responses, group A only gave 5% correct responses, while group B
provided the correct answer in 73% of the cases and group C in 87%. In fact only two children in group A
produced masculine determiners at all and two children in group B did not use any masculine
determiners. Moreover, group A produced over 40% incorrect determiner-noun combinations, while
group B produced errors in 16% of the cases and group C made very few errors with masculine nouns,
namely less than 4%. All but three of the errors involved the substitution of the masculine determiner by
the neuter determiner (n=36, 2 indefinite and 34 definite) and from the total 39 incorrect responses, 24
(62%) contained nouns where children had dropped the final –s, e.g. to neut elefanda instead of o masc
elefandas masc ‘the elephant’, to neut skilo instead of o masc skilos masc ‘the dog’, to neut /i fem kuva instead of o masc
kuvas masc ‘the bucket’, etc. This type of error is interesting because on the one hand, the dropping of the
final –s with masculine nouns usually coincides with the form it would take in the accusative singular
(e.g. ton masc elefanda masc ) 28 and on the other hand, -s dropping with the (typically) masculine endings –os
and –as yields endings that are highly predictive of neuter gender, i.e. –o and –a (where –a is also a
possible ending for feminine nouns which would explain the single occurrence of i fem kuva ‘the bucket’).
As with neuter nouns, children also produced many invalid responses with masculine nouns (group A:
52%, group B: 11% and group C: 9%). The majority of excluded responses were determiner omissions,
which were highest for group A (44%) and considerably lower for groups B and C (7-8%).
28
Note that only masculine nouns have two different forms for nominative and accusative singular, while the vast majority of
feminine nouns and all neuter nouns take the same form in the nominative and accusative singular.
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Table 17. Group results in numbers and percentages for the various types of responses for masculine nouns in the Det-N task.
A
B
C
Correct
Incorrect
Total
definite
def. neut
indef. neut
def. fem
4.8%
35.5%
3.2%
4.8%
3/62
22/62
2/62
3/62
73.0%
Excluded
Total
omission
no answer
other
43.6%
43.5%
8.1%
51.6%
27/62
27/62
5/62
32/62
15.9%
15.9%
7.9%
1.6%
1.6%
11.1%
46/63
10/63
10/63
5/63
1/63
1/63
7/63
87.0%
3.7%
3.7%
7.4%
1.9%
9.3%
47/54
2/54
2/54
4/54
1/54
5/54
Children did better with feminine nouns than with masculine nouns. The group results for
feminine nouns are presented in Table 18. Considering again all types of responses, group A gave correct
answers in 18% of the cases, group B in 84% and group C in 95%. There was only one instance where a
(feminine) diminutive was used instead of a root noun and three cases where children used an indefinite
determiner. Only three children in group A produced feminine determiners at all, while two children in
group B did not use any feminine determiners. The number of incorrect responses for feminine nouns was
lower than for masculine nouns, namely 18% for group A, 5% for group B and group C did not produce
any incorrect responses. When children gave incorrect responses, they always used a neuter determiner
instead of a feminine determiner (1 indefinite and 13 definite). The number of excluded responses was
high also for feminine nouns, reaching 64% in group A, 11% in group B and 5% in group C and the
majority of these kinds of responses involved the omission of the determiner (group A: 48%, group B:
11% and group C: 5%).
Table 18. Group results in numbers and percentages for the various types of responses for feminine nouns in the Det-N task.
Correct
def
A
B
C
Total
def+dim
indef
Incorrect
def
indef
neut
neut
Total
Excluded
omission
Total
no
other
answer
16.4%
1.6% 18.0% 16.4% 1.6%
18.0% 47.5%
13.1%
3.3% 64.0%
10/61
1/61
11/61
29/61
8/61
2/61
11/61
10/61
1/61
39/61
83.9%
83.9% 4.8%
4.8%
11.3%
11.3%
52/62
52/62
3/62
7/62
7/62
3/62
90.6% 1.6%
3.1% 95.3%
4.7%
4.7%
58/64
2/64
3/64
3/64
1/64
61/64
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The group results for the three gender conditions are summarized in Table 19. The average
percentage correct was calculated by dividing the total number of correct responses by the number of
responses containing nouns of the same gender produced with any determiner. Considering only the valid
responses, all groups scored 100% correct with neuter nouns suggesting that children might use neuter as
a default gender. All groups score higher on feminine than on masculine nouns and accuracy improves
from group A to B and group B to C for both genders. Whereas group C performs target-like on all three
genders, group B is target-like on neuter and feminine, while scores for masculine are lower, but still
relatively high (82%). Group A scores very low with masculine nouns (10%) and performs considerably
better with feminine nouns (50%). Seven of the eleven children in group A only produced neuter
determiners, one produced only neuter and a few feminine determiners and one child did not use any
determiners at all. In group B, one child only produced neuter determiners and one only neuter and
feminine determiners. The number of excluded responses was very high for group A, regardless of gender
condition (between 37% and 64%), while for groups B and C the percentages were much lower (between
5% and 14%). Overall there were more invalid responses for masculine nouns than for neuter nouns and
more for feminine nouns than neuter and masculine nouns.
Table 19. Summary of the group results for the three gender conditions of the Det-N task.
Neuter
Correct
A
B
C
Masculine
Incorrect
Excluded
Feminine
Correct Incorrect Excluded Correct Incorrect Excluded
100%
37.3%
10%
90%
51.6%
50.0%
50.0%
64.0%
47/47
28/75
3/30
27/30
32/62
11/22
11/22
39/61
100%
6.9%
82.1%
17.9%
11.1%
94.5%
5.5%
11.3%
68/68
5/73
46/56
10/56
7/63
52/55
3/55
7/62
100%
13.8%
95.9%
4.1%
9.3%
100%
4.7%
69/69
11/80
47/49
2/49
5/54
61/61
3/64
Det-Adj-N Task
The Det-Adj-N task was administered to elicit two determiner-adjective-noun strings for each of the 18
target nouns. As with the Det-N task, we will first consider all types of responses for each gender
seperately. Table 20 presents the group results for neuter nouns. Children made very few errors with
neuter nouns (group A: 2%, group B: 3% and group C: 0%) and five of the seven errors were of the type
*D-*Adj-N, that is the determiner and adjective were agreeing in gender, but they were not agreeing with
the gender of the target noun (e.g. i fem megali fem tilefono neut ‘the big telephone’, i fem kitrini fem psari neut ‘the
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yellow fish’). Children in group C performed better than group B and group B did better than A and all
groups had more than 90% correct from the total number of responses. The number of excluded items was
much lower than in the Det-N task and decreases from group A (8%) to group B (5%) and from B to
group C (1%). Most invalid responses of groups A and B were due to the omission of the determiner or
adjective and there were four ‘no answer’ responses in group A.
Table 20. Group results in number and percentages for the various kinds of responses for neuter nouns in the Det-Adj-N task.
Correct Incorrect
D-Adj-N
A
B
C
*D*Adj
Total Excluded
*D*Adj*N
*D
Total
Det.
Adj.
Indecl.
No
omiss
omiss
Adj.
answer
other
90.1%
1.3%
0.7%
2.0%
4.6%
0.7%
2.6%
7.9%
136/151
2/151
1/151
3/151
7/151
1/151
4/151
12/151
92.5%
2.1%
0.7%
2.7%
3.4%
1.4%
4.8%
135/146
3/146
1/146
4/146
5/146
2/146
7/146
99.3%
0.7%
0.7%
149/150
1/150
1/150
Children had considerably more problems in establishing gender agreement with masculine
nouns. The group results are given in Table 21. Group A gave correct responses in 8% of the cases, group
B in 70% and group C in 88% of the total number of responses. The number of incorrect responses was
highest for group A (70%), followed by group B with 24% and group C gave 8% incorrect responses. The
major error type in all groups was *Det-*Adj-*N where the determiner and adjective are agreeing in
gender, but there is no agreement between the determiner and the noun, which was not produced in its
target form (e.g. to neut aspro neut skilo instead of o masc aspros masc skilos masc ‘the white dog’, to neut megalo neut
kuva instead of o masc megalos masc kuvas masc ‘the big bucket’). Moreover, group A (and to a less extent also
group B) produced errors of the type *Det-*Adj-N (to neut mikro neut vatrachos masc ‘the small frog’, to neut
megalo neut skilos masc ‘the big dog’), while errors that involved a mismatch between the gender of the
determiner and the gender of the adjective were very infrequent (2.4% for group A and 1.5% for group
B). The number of invalid responses reaches 22% in group A and drops to 6% in group B and 4% in
group C. Most excluded responses were due to determiner or adjective omission (24/41, 59%), but there
were also some cases were children used indeclinable adjectives or non-target nouns (e.g. karchari
instead of karcharias ‘shark’ or kuvi instead of kuvas ‘bucket’, which were coded as ‘other’) and a few
cases were children did not provide any response.
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Table 21. Group results in number and percentages for the various kinds of responses for masculine nouns in the Det-Adj-N task.
A
B
C
Correct
Incorrect
D-Adj-N
*D*Adj
Total
*D*Adj*N
*D
*Adj
Excluded
Total
Det.
Adj.
Indecl.
No
omiss
omiss
Adj.
answer
other
8%
33.6%
33.6%
1.6%
0.8%
69.6%
10.4%
3.2%
1.6%
3.2%
4.0%
22.4%
10/125
42/125
42/125
2/125
1/125
87/125
13/125
4/125
2/125
4/125
5/125
28/125
70.2%
4.6%
17.6%
1.5%
23.7%
1.5%
1.5%
3.1%
6.1%
92/131
6/131
23/131
2/131
31/131
2/131
2/131
4/131
8/131
88.1%
7.6%
7.6%
0.8%
1.7%
1.7%
4.2%
104/118
9/118
9/118
1/118
2/118
2/118
5/118
Overall, children did again better with feminine than with masculine nouns. The group results are
presented in Table 22. The number of correct responses increases from group A (23%) to group B (80%),
reaching 98% in group C. Group A gave incorrect responses in 55% of the cases and group B in 8%,
while group C did not produce any incorrect responses. The most common error type was *Det-*Adj-N
(e.g. to neut megalo neut zoni fem ‘the big belt’, to neut megalo neut gata fem ‘the big cat’) and there were only two
instances where the determiner did not agree with the gender of the noun (and adjective). The number of
excluded responses was 22% for group A, 12% for group B and 2% for group C. Determiner omissions
were quite frequent in group A (10%), while group B only produced a handful of responses were either
the determiner or adjective were missing (2% and 3%, respectively). In all groups there were children
who used indeclinable adjectives in their responses and all groups produced other kinds of responses that
did not fit into the adopted coding scheme. Finally, there were only two instances where children did not
provide any answer, which were both in group A.
Table 22. Group results in number and percentages for the various kinds of responses for feminine nouns in the Det-Adj-N task.
A
B
C
Correct
Incorrect
D-Adj-N
*D*Adj
Total
*D
Excluded
Total
Det.
Adj.
Indecl.
No
omiss
omiss
Adj.
answer
other
23.3%
53.3%
1.7%
55.0%
10.0%
1.7%
1.7%
8.3%
21.7%
28/120
64/120
2/120
66/120
12/120
2/120
2/120
10/120
26/120
79.8%
8.4%
8.4%
1.7%
2.5%
5.0%
2.5%
11.8%
95/119
10/119
10/119
2/119
3/119
6/119
3/119
14/119
97.7%
1.6%
0.8%
2.3%
125/128
2/128
1/128
3/128
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A summary of the group results is provided in Table 23. As in the Det-N task, the average
percentage correct for each gender condition was calculated by dividing the number of correct responses
by the total number of nouns of the same gender that were produced with a determiner and an adjective
that were marked for (any) gender. When only the valid responses are taken into account, all children
seem to perform target-like on neuter nouns, scoring over 97% correct and thus, supporting the claim that
neuter has a default function. All groups perform better on feminine than on masculine and better on
neuter than both masculine and feminine. For both masculine and feminine, accuracy improves from
group a to B and from group B to C. Group A scores very low on both masculine (10%) and feminine
(30%), while group B is almost target-like with feminine (>90%) and scores much higher on masculine
than group A (75% compared to 10%). Group C scores 100%, but still makes occasional errors with
masculine nouns (92% correct).
Table 23. Summary of the group results for the three gender conditions of the Det-Adj-N task.
Neuter
A
B
C
Masculine
Feminine
Correct
Incorrect
Excluded
Correct
Incorrect Excluded Correct
Incorrect Excluded
97.8%
2.2%
7.9%
10.3%
89.7%
22.4%
29.8%
70.2%
21.7%
136/139
3/139
12/151
10/97
87/97
28/125
28/94
66/94
26/120
97.1%
2.9%
4.8%
74.8%
25.2%
6.1%
90.5%
9.5%
11.8%
135/139
4/139
7/146
92/123
31/123
8/131
95/105
10/105
14/119
100%
0.7%
92.0%
8.0%
4.2%
100%
2.3%
149/149
1/150
104/113
9/113
5/118
125/125
3/128
3.3.5 Greek Knowledge Task (GJT)
In the knowledge task (GJT), children had to choose between congruent and incongruent determiner-noun
combinations. Accuracy scores were calculated by dividing the number of correct responses by the total
number of nouns of the same gender. Two children showed a response bias and were excluded from the
analysis (both were from group A and among the youngest participants, i.e. < 6;0). The group results are
presented in Table 24 below. Performance on each of the three genders improves with increasing
proficiency (as indicated by the vocabulary scores). Overall children perform better on feminine than on
masculine nouns and better on neuter than both masculine and feminine nouns. The lower scores for
group A are at least partly due to three children who perform at chance level. Exclusion of these three
children results in scores above 90% in all three genders for group A. In group B there is also one
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participant (aged 5;2) who seemed to choose between the congruent and incongruent determiner-noun
strings in a random fashion. Generally, scores are high for all groups, with the most advanced group
scoring 100% in all three conditions.
Table 24. Group results (percentages correct) for the knowledge task (GJT).
Group
Average
Neuter
Masculine
Feminine
A
79.6%
88.9%
72.2%
77.8%
B
90.4%
92.4%
86.4%
92.4%
C
100%
100%
100%
100%
3.3.6 Comparisons
Comparison Det-N agreement vs. Det-Adj-N agreement
Accuracy scores for the Det-N and the Det-Adj-N task are presented in Figure 7. For neuter nouns, all
children perform at ceiling in both tasks, although groups A and B did make some errors in the Det-Adj-N
task, but not in the Det-N task. For masculine nouns, group A scores equally low in both tasks, while
groups B and C do slightly worse in the Det-Adj-N task (the difference amounts to 7% for group B and
4% for group C). For feminine nouns, there is quite a big difference in accuracy scores between the two
tasks for group A (20%), whereby children did again better on the Det-N than on the Det-Adj-N task. For
group B this difference is very small (5%), but again children did better in the Det-N task, while group C
performs at ceiling in both tasks. Overall, it seems that type of agreement has not a lot of influence on
childrens’ accuracy scores (with the exception of group A, who does considerably worse with feminine
nouns in the Det-Adj-N compared to the Det-N task). Nevertheless, the fact that children do make more
errors in the Det-Adj-N task than in the Det-N task is inconsistent with the hypothesis that children make
use of a rule-based system for syntactic agreement already from the earliest stages of gender acquisition
as has been suggested by Unsworth (2013b). Alternatively, it could be argued that the application of these
agreement rules is compromised in syntactically more complex contexts which would explain the higher
error rates in determiner-adjective-noun agreement than in determiner-noun agreement.
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100%
% correct
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
Det-N
Det-Adj-N
Neuter
Det-N
Det-Adj-N
Masculine
Det-N
Det-Adj-N
Feminine
A
100%
97.80%
10%
10.30%
50%
29.80%
B
100%
97.10%
82.10%
74.80%
94.50%
90.50%
C
100%
100%
95.90%
92%
100%
100%
Figure 7. Accuracy scores for the Det-N and the Det-Adj-N task in percentages.
Comparison with Canta (2012)
As mentioned above, Canta (2012) tested a group of Italian-Dutch bilinguals on an Italian version of the
PDT task. The group results are summarized in Table 25. The young group consisted of 17 children aged
3;3-5;6 and the old group comprised 10 children aged 5;6-7;11 29. For the Italian-Dutch bilinguals the
most common error type involved a mismatch between the gender of the adjective and the gender of the
determiner and noun (i.e. *Adj). With feminine nouns, children also committed a number of errors where
both determiner and adjective were produced in the incorrect gender and for the older bilinguals this was
the most frequent error type (10%). A comparison of the error types of the Italian-Dutch bilinguals tested
in Italian with the error profile of the Greek-Dutch bilinguals tested in Greek (see Table 26) reveals some
interesting differences. Unlike in Italian, in Greek children hardly produce any errors that involve either
an incorrect determiner or an incorrect adjective, that is, they almost always make the adjective agree with
the gender of the determiner. In Italian, errors that involve only one incorrect element within the DP are
much more frequent (5% - 6% for adjectives in the masculine condition and 6% - 19% for adjectives in
the feminine condition). In Greek, children produced this kind of error only in three instances with
masculine nouns. In contrast, the Greek-Dutch bilinguals produced many errors of the type *Det *Adj
(including *Det *Adj *N for masculine). For group A more than 50% of the valid responses for feminine
nouns contained this kind of error and incorrect responses of group B were all of this type (8%). For
29
It should be kept in mind that the Greek-Dutch bilinguals of the present study were grouped according to a different criteria
(i.e. vocabulary scores) and were considerably older than the Italian-Dutch bilinguals in Canta (2012).
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Evelyn Egger
masculine nouns, 67% of all responses of group A contained this error and which decreased to 22% in
group B and to 8% in group C.
Table 25. Group results of the Italian-Dutch bilinguals in Canta (2011) for the Italian version of the PDT task. For masculine
nouns the il/l’ distinction was not taken into account.
Masculine
Group
Correct
Feminine
Incorrect
*Det
Excluded
*Adj
Correct
*Det
Incorrect
*Det
Excluded
*Adj
*Det
*Adj
Young
92.8%
1.5%
*Adj
5.7%
30.7%
180/194 3/194 11/194
Old
94.1%
0.3%
5.3%
86/280
0.3%
68.1%
32/608
18.8%
10%
109/160 5/160 30/160 16/160
5.3%
542/576 2/576 30/576 2/576
3.1%
83%
1.3%
5.9%
9.8%
439/529 7/529 31/529 52/529
35.5%
88/248
2.8%
15/544
Table 26. Number and percentages of error types in the Det-Adj-N task per group and gender condition. Errors of the type
*Det*Adj*N are collapsed with the errors of the type *Det *Adj.
Neuter
A
B
C
Masculine
Feminine
*D*Adj
*D
*D*Adj
*D
*Adj
*D*Adj
*D
1.3%
0.7%
67.2%
1.6%
0.8%
53.3%
1.7%
2/151
1/151
84/125
2/125
1/125
64/120
2/120
2.7%
22.1%
1.5%
8.4%
4/146
29/131
2/131
10/119
7.6%
9/118
Comparison production tasks vs. knowledge task
To compare children’s performance with determiner-noun agreement on the production tasks and the
knowledge task, accuracy scores are summarized in Table 25 below. For masculine and feminine nouns,
all groups perform better in the judgment than in the production tasks. The difference is particularly large
for group A where it reaches 63% for masculine and 41% for feminine nouns. Group C is target-like on
determiner-noun agreement in all conditions (>98%), with the exception of the production of masculine
nouns which still yields occasional errors even in the most advanced group (92% correct). Group B also
demonstrates few problems with determiner-noun agreement and scores over 86% correct in all
conditions, except with the production of masculine nouns where accuracy scores are 77%. For neuter
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MA Thesis 2013
Evelyn Egger
nouns, the picture looks slightly different. While group C performs at ceiling in both kinds of tasks
(>99%), groups A and B seem to do better on production than on judgment of the target determiner-noun
combinations, although this difference is admittedly small with 6% for group A and 4% for group B.
Neuter
Production
Masculine
Judgment
Production
Feminine
Judgment
Production
Judgment
A
95.1%
88.9%
9.4%
72.2%
36.7%
77.8%
B
96.3%
92.4%
76.9%
86.4%
87.2%
92.4%
C
99.7%
100%
92%
100%
98.9%
100%
4 Discussion
The present study aimed at investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek-Dutch bilingual
children in the two respective languages. Having presented the relevant data, in the next section the
results will be interpreted in light of the research questions introduced in section 3.1 30. Finally, in section
4.2, we will try to put the present findings into a broader context and discuss their relevance for
investigations of bilingual SLI.
4.1 General Discussion
The first research question asked whether having a transparent gender system with extensive gender
marking in the L1 (in the present case Greek) has an effect on the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender.
The first observation that can be made is that the Greek-Dutch bilinguals show improvement on gender
agreement (both determiner-noun and adjective-noun) as a function of general language proficiency (as
indicated by their vocabulary scores). Thus, the bilinguals of the present study do not seem to fossilize in
the acquisition of Dutch gender, i.e. given they receive sufficient amount of exposure (and time), they are
perfectly able to acquire the Dutch gender system in a target-like fashion. Unfortunately, a direct
comparison with the English-Dutch bilinguals from Unsworth’s (2013a) study who used the exact same
tests is a bit difficult due to different grouping criteria (age in Unsworth vs. vocabulary score in the
present study). Nevertheless, results indicate that the two populations show some crucial differences in
30
Throughout the discussion of the results, it should be kept in mind that we did not test for statistical significance of the various
differences.
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their performance patterns. First, Greek-Dutch bilinguals seem to overgeneralize het to common nouns
much more frequently than both the English-Dutch and the Italian-Dutch bilinguals. Second, the GreekDutch bilinguals appear to perform better on neuter than on common nouns in the grammaticality
judgment task, while the English-Dutch bilinguals show the reverse pattern. It is likely that the better
performance on neuter nouns in the GJT by the Greek-Dutch bilinguals is the result of a tendency to
overgeneralize het, i.e. this tendency to use het instead of de is even stronger when children are asked to
judge congruent and incongruent determiner-noun combinations. Given the lack of consistent and
transparent gender cues in Dutch, which has been claimed to be one of the main factors contributing to its
late acquisition, we take the overgeneralization of het to common nouns as a sign of gender awareness,
i.e. children are aware that there is a grammatical gender distinction. Moreover, the overgeneralization of
the neuter determiner in Dutch can be interpreted as an instance of cross-linguistic influence from Greek
to Dutch, given that the Italian-Dutch bilinguals in Canta (2012) did not show such a tendency and given
that neuter is the default gender in Greek (Tsimpli & Hulk, to appear). When comparing the results of the
present study with those obtained by Algoe (2011) for Italian-Dutch bilinguals, a similar observation can
be made. The Italian-Dutch bilinguals hardly ever overgeneralize het to common nouns, while the GreekDutch produce this error quite frequently. Moreover, a direct comparison between the two data sets
reveals an interesting pattern. On the one hand, the Greek-Dutch bilinguals score consistently higher on
neuter nouns than the Italian-Dutch bilinguals, but on the other hand, they seem to make more errors with
common nouns compared to the Italian-Dutch bilinguals. This indicates a qualitative difference in the
acquisition of gender between the two bilingual populations. It is possible that a 2-way gender system is
not enough to enhance gender awareness. However, it is not clear whether this is simply an age effect
(given that the bilinguals of the present study were considerably older than the bilinguals in Algoe’s
(2011) study) or whether this difference is caused by the nature of the gender system in the L1 or
differences related to input factors (i.e exposure patterns). A more systematic approach is needed where
the two populations are matched for age and/or input to determine the source of these differences.
Nevertheless, given that overgeneralization of het is an error profile that (almost) never occurs in
monolinguals and is only rarely reported in studies on the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender, the
present findings strongly suggest that the way gender is marked in a bilinguals’ (other) L1 has an effect
on the acquisition of Dutch gender.
The second research questions concerned the relationship between determiner-noun and
adjective-noun agreement. A comparison between the accuracy scores on the two types of agreement
suggests that not only do the Greek-Dutch bilinguals show more or less parallel development for
determiner-noun and adjective-noun agreement, but some of the groups also reach similar accuracy scores
for the two types of agreement (i.e. groups B and C). For common nouns, group A performs better on
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determiner-noun agreement than on adjectival agreement, while for group D the pattern is reversed
showing better performance on adjectival agreement than on determiner-noun agreement. This suggests
that during the initial stages of gender acquisition in Dutch (group A in the present study), children have
more problems with the syntactic aspects of gender agreement than with the lexical part, while at later
stages (group D in the present study) rules for syntactic agreement are in place, but children are still
learning which nouns take het and which take de. Alternatively, it could be argued that adjectival
agreement is more complex than determiner-noun agreement (see Silveira, 2011) since it requires more
syntactic computations and that this difference in complexity affects performance during initial stages of
acquisition (group A), but not at more advanced levels (group D). For neuter nouns, both group A and D
show higher accuracy scores for adjective-noun agreement than for determiner-noun agreement. Thus, for
group B and C (and possibly also D) it can be argued that the results provide evidence that these children
make use of abstract gender representations (i.e. features), while this is not clear for group A since there is
improvement from group A to B for the use of het and adjectives with common nouns, but at the same
time, there is a drop in accuracy rates for de and bare adjectives. Generally speaking, group A poses a bit
of a problem since they performed better on neuter nouns than group B on adjectival agreement in the
PDT and on determiner-noun agreement in the Story task, but not in the PDT. As such it is not clear
whether group A is indeed at a less advanced stage in the acquisition of Dutch gender than group B as
suggested by their vocabulary scores. The relatively high accuracy scores of group A indicate that for this
group, some other factor than vocabulary score may be a better indicator of their performance with neuter
nouns. A closer look at the input variables for the children in group A (see Appendix A) reveals that for 3
of the 6 children in group A, Dutch seems to be the dominant language (since it is the language they
speak with their siblings) and they scored low on the Dutch vocabulary test (but relatively high on the
gender tasks) in spite of having had long and extensive exposure to Dutch.
As to the Greek results, a comparison between accuracy scores on the Det-N task and the DetAdj-N task reveals that children did better with determiner-noun agreement than with determineradjective-noun agreement. However, these differences were very small, with the exception of group A,
who scored considerably higher on the Det-N than on the Det-Adj-N task for feminine nouns (50% vs.
30%). The results for masculine and neuter nouns are thus in line with findings from Mastropavlou (2006)
for Greek monolinguals, who also showed no notable difference in accuracy scores between the
determiner-noun and adjectival agreement. On the other hand, the higher scores for determiner-noun
agreement in the feminine condition by group A suggest that children have more problems with adjectival
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agreement than with determiner-noun agreement 31. Similar findings have been reported for L2 learners of
Greek (Tsimpli, 2003), who performed significantly better on determiner-noun agreement than on
adjectival agreement. There are several explanations for children’s better performance on the Det-N task.
One the one hand, it can be argued that determiner-adjective-noun agreement requires more syntactic
operations than determiner-noun agreement. On the other hand, it is also the case that determiners are
generally more frequent in the input and show more phonological regularities than adjectives (Silveira,
2011). Nevertheless, the parallel improvement of the two types of agreement across groups indicates that
children make use of gender cues to establish abstract representations of the gender paradigm in Greek. In
addition, the finding that accuracy on the two types of agreement seems to improve in parallel as a
function of increasing vocabulary scores suggests that vocabulary score is a good indicator of
performance on gender agreement in Greek.
Turning to the question about the error types the Greek-Dutch bilinguals commit in determineradjective-noun agreement, results showed that children almost always made the determiner agree with the
adjective, but not necessarily the determiner with the noun. Moreover, when children failed to establish
correct gender agreement, errors of the type *Det *Adj (including *Det *Adj *N for masculine nouns)
were by far the most frequent type regardless of group and gender condition which is in line with
findings from Mastropavlou (2006) for Greek monolinguals with and without SLI. In contrast, children
hardly ever produced determiner-adjective-noun strings where only one element was marked for the
wrong gender (i.e. error types *Det and *Adj). This pattern could be explained by claiming that when
children do not know the gender of a noun, they automatically fall back on the neuter default. The use of a
default gender has been argued to occur when no agreement can be established and appears to involve
less or different syntactic operations (Hulk & Tsimpli, to appear). In contrast, the Italian-Dutch bilinguals
in Canta (2011) made very few errors that involved both an incorrect determiner and an incorrect
adjective. Overall, the Italian-Dutch bilinguals made less errors than the Greek-Dutch bilinguals
suggesting that they are at a more advanced stage in the acquisition of gender, where they know the
gender of the respective nouns, however, they make occasional errors in maintaining gender agreement on
adjectives. It is also possible that the different error patterns of the two populations are due to structural
differences of the respective languages. In Italian, adjectives typically occur in post-nominal positions,
while in Greek they are always prenominal. Thus, adjectives in Italian are often not adjacent to
determiners which appears to cause children more difficulties to maintain gender concord. Interestingly,
Mastropavlou (2006) found that Greek monolingual children with SLI also occasionally produce
determiner-adjective-noun strings that contain a mismatch between the adjective on the one hand and the
31
It is likely that the lack of such a relatively large difference between the two tasks for masculine nouns is due to the fact that
many children in group A did not seem to have established masculine gender in their grammar yet, since they did not produce
any masculine determiners or adjectives in the masculine form at all.
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determiner and the noun on the other (i.e. *Adj). Crucially though, all the instances of incorrect gender
marking on the adjective were produced by one child and all involved an incorrect word order, in that the
child put the adjectives in the post-nominal position (i.e. determiner-noun-adjective instead of determineradjective-noun). Moreover, Roulet-Amiot & Jakubowicz (2006) also found that French typically
developing and language-impaired monolinguals produced more agreement errors with DPs that
contained post-nominal adjectives compared to phrases containing prenominal adjectives. Thus, the
present results strongly suggest that the difference in types of agreement errors between the Italian-Dutch
bilinguals in Canta (2012) and the Greek-Dutch bilinguals of the present study are due to structural
differences between Italian and Greek.
The fifth research question asked whether the bilinguals of the present study show the same
performance patterns across gender conditions as previously attested in the respective monolinguals and
other bilingual populations. For Greek, the answer is an unequivocal yes, children in all groups are at
ceiling with neuter nouns and perform worse with masculine nouns, while accuracy rates for feminine
nouns are inbetween (i.e. neut>fem>masc). Moreover, when children make errors in gender agreement
with feminine and on masculine nouns, they always fall back on neuter (i.e. they almost never use
feminine instead of masculine or masculine instead feminine), which is in line with previous findings (e.g.
Mastropavlou, 2006; Unsworth et al., 2011b) and supports the claim that neuter is the default gender in
Greek (Tsimpli & Hulk, to appear). As to the Dutch tests, here the bilinguals of the present study seem to
perform differently than monolinguals and other bilinguals in that they showed a relatively strong
tendency to overgeneralize het to common nouns, which is an error that has hardly been found in other
bilingual populations tested so far. As already argued above, this qualitative difference between the
Greek-Dutch bilinguals on the one hand and the Italian-Dutch bilinguals in Canta (2012) and the EnglishDutch bilinguals in Unsworth (2013a) on the other, is taken as evidence for cross-linguistic influence
from Greek to Dutch.
The last research question concerned the relative performance on the judgment and production
tasks for the two genders. For Dutch, results showed that there is an asymmetry on children’s
performance on the two tasks and for the two gender conditions. For neuter nouns, all groups performed
better on judgment than on production, while the reverse was found for common nouns (i.e. production
was better than judgment). This two-fold asymmetry is in line with findings for monolinguals (Unsworth
& Hulk, 2010a) and English-Dutch bilinguals (Unsworth, 2013a), however, it is not clear why this pattern
holds for both the advanced and less advanced groups alike. On the assumption that knowledge (i.e.
judgment) generally precedes production, it could be argued that the children’s higher accuracy rate for
production with common nouns reflects the use de as a default, rather than explicit knowledge of which
nouns take the common determiner. In other words, since production is assumed to be more difficult than
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judgment, children are more likely to fall back on the default-use of de in production than in judgment.
Similarly, in the Greek tests, children also did better on production than on judgment for the ‘default’
gender (i.e. neuter) 32, but accuracy was lower on production than on judgment for masculine and feminine
nouns. Thus, it seems that better performance on production than on judgment is a characteristic of
‘default genders’ (i.e. common in Dutch and neuter in Greek), but not of the ‘more difficult’ gender
classes in a given language (i.e. neuter in Dutch and masculine and feminine in Greek).
In sum, the findings of the present study provide evidence for cross-linguistic influence from
Greek to Dutch, as indicated by the qualitative differences between the Greek-Dutch bilinguals on the one
hand, and the Italian-Dutch (Canta, 2012) and English-Dutch bilinguals (Unsworth, 2013a) on the other.
In contrast, performance patterns in the Greek tests were highly similar to those that have been attested
for monolinguals (Mastropavlou, 2006) and English-Greek bilinguals (Unsworth et al., 2011) suggesting
that there is no cross-linguistic from Dutch to Greek.
Having discussed the results of the present study in light of previous findings for the respective
monolingual children and other bilingual populations, the next section will try to point out the relevance
of the present findings for language-impaired bilingual children.
4.2 Relevance & implications for the study of bilinguals SLI
Mastropavlou (2006) investigated gender agreement in a group of Greek monolingual children with SLI
aged 4;2 to 5;9. Results showed that the language-impaired children did not have significant problems
with determiner-noun agreement (accuracy rates were above 92% for all three genders). However, similar
to the bilinguals of the present study, the children with SLI committed more agreement errors with
masculine and feminine nouns in the Det-Adj-N task than in the Det-N task (7.3% vs. 17.5% for
masculine and 0% vs. 8.3% for feminine). Moreover, there was no statistically significant difference in
accuracy scores between the language-impaired children and the monolingual TD controls that were
matched on language development (LD controls) 33 for the Det-N task. In contrast, results for the Det-AdjN task indicated that the LD controls performed slightly better than the children with SLI (93% vs. 83%
for masculine, 98% vs. 93% for feminine and 100% vs. 100% for neuter), although the differences did not
reach significance. Overall, children with SLI did not seem to have serious difficulties neither with gender
marking nor with gender agreement and performed high on all gender tasks.
32
33
Although the difference between judgment and production was much smaller than for the common nouns of the Dutch tests.
Language development was determined by children’s scores on the morpho-syntactic sections of the DVIQ.
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Keij, Cornips, van Hout, Hulk & van Emmerik (2012) investigated the acquisition of Dutch
definite determiners for both production and knowledge in a group of monolingual children with SLI, a
monolingual control group 34 and a group of bilinguals of the same age range as the TD controls.
Moreover, each of the three groups was divided into two age levels (level I and level II) in order to
examine the developmental paths of the three groups. For the production task, all groups performed better
with common nouns than with neuter nouns and the monolingual controls performed significantly better
than both the bilinguals and the SLI group, but there was no significant difference between the bilingual
group and the SLI group. However, there was a qualitative difference between the bilinguals and the SLI
group in that the bilinguals performed better at the higher age level for neuter nouns, whereas there was
no overall development for the SLI group whose scores did not improve across the two age levels for
either gender. As to the knowledge task (grammaticality judgment task), the monolinguals performed
again better than the bilinguals and the children with SLI, but no difference was found between the
bilinguals and the SLI group. The monolingual controls performed better on common than on neuter
nouns and there was improvement in accuracy scores across the two age levels. In contrast, there was no
effect of gender for the bilinguals and the younger group (level I) performed better than the older group
(level II) (83% vs. 62% for common and 82% vs. 65% for neuter nouns). Finally, for the SLI group no
significant effects were found for either gender or age level. The children with SLI at the younger age
level reached similar accuracy scores for neuter and common nouns, while at level II they did better with
common than with neuter nouns. For common nouns, accuracy rates improved from level I to level II, but
dropped for neuter nouns. A comparison between performance on the production and the knowledge task
revealed that the bilinguals showed the same pattern as previously attested in Unsworth & Hulk (2010a)
and Unsworth (2013a) as well as the bilinguals of the present study, namely better production than
judgment for common nouns and better judgment than production for neuter nouns. The monolingual
control group did not show this pattern, instead performance was better on the knowledge task than the
production task for both genders (although the differences were very small, i.e. between 1% and 6%). The
younger SLI group (level I) patterned similar to the bilingual group (i.e. production>judgment for
common and judgment>production for neuter) while the older SLI group did better on knowledge than on
production for both genders as the monolingual controls. However, the analysis of variance revealed
different effects for the bilingual and the SLI group suggesting not only a qualitative but also a
quantitative difference between the two groups. To account for the findings, it was argued that the three
groups are at different stages in the discovery of the Dutch gender paradigm. While the older
monolinguals have discovered the Dutch gender paradigm, the bilinguals at level II are still in the process
34
The monolingual control group was two years younger, since previous research has indicated that the language-impaired
children typically show a delay of around two years in terms of language development compared to their typically-developing
monolingual peers (Keij et al., 2012).
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of acquiring the paradigm, although they show increased awareness of Dutch grammatical gender
compared to the younger bilinguals (level I). The children with SLI are still at an earlier stage, where they
are aware of the gender distinction in Dutch, but unlike the bilinguals, they do not show any development
in production or knowledge.
Orgassa (2009) investigated the acquisition of determiner-noun and adjectival agreement in
Dutch in Turkish-Dutch bilinguals with and without SLI and Dutch monolinguals with and without SLI.
Turkish does not have grammatical gender instantiated, so cross-linguistic influence could be ruled out.
Statistical analysis revealed both SLI effects (TD monolinguals > monolinguals with SLI and TD
bilinguals > bilinguals with SLI) and L2 effects (TD monolinguals > TD bilinguals and monolinguals
with SLI >bilinguals with SLI). In fact, it was questioned whether the two SLI groups had an abstract
representation of gender at all since they produced only very few neuter definite determiners both with
root noun and diminutives (especially the bilinguals with SLI). The bilingual group with SLI performed
worse than all other groups which was taken as evidence for a cumulative effect of SLI and bilingualism.
Similar results were obtained for adjectival inflection.
In contrast to the above mentioned studies, some researchers have found that bilingual children
with SLI can reach accuracy levels that are as high as those of their monolingual peers with SLI (e.g.
Paradis, 2007). Unsworth & Hulk (2010b) argue that the different findings can be related to four factors,
age of onset, societal context, cognitive maturity and the nature of the languages involved. For example,
the subjects in Orgassa (2009) were all sequential bilinguals and the societal context was not necessarily
ideal for successful dual-language development. Moreover, gender is absent in Turkish which might
further hinder the discovery of gender distinctions in Dutch. Thus, more research is needed in order to
determine the factors that facilitate positive cross-linguistic influence for both typically-developing and
language-impaired bilinguals.
Coming back to the findings of the present study, it was argued that Greek has a positive
influence on the acquisition of Dutch gender in bilinguals. In addition, unlike language-impaired Dutch
monolinguals, Greek monolinguals with SLI do not seem to have significant problems with gender
agreement. Thus, it is possible that the positive cross-linguistic influence observed for the bilinguals of
the present study also extends to Greek-Dutch bilinguals that have been diagnosed with SLI. Future
research is needed to address this question and as well as systematic comparisons between the languageimpaired and the typically-developing monolinguals and bilinguals to examine whether there is an
overlap between the error profiles of the various groups that could lead to potential misclassifications of
bilinguals with and without SLI.
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5 Conclusions
The present paper aimed at investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender in a group of Greek-Dutch
bilingual children. A short overview on the notions of gender assignment and gender agreement was
provided and the gender systems of the two languages under study were presented together with the
relevant findings for the respective monolinguals and bilinguals. Six research questions were formulated
that concerned the comparison of the Greek-Dutch bilinguals’ performance patterns across tasks and
conditions as well as comparisons with other bilingual populations. On the basis of the findings it was
argued that the nature of the gender system of the ‘other language’ and more specifically the way in
which gender is marked has an effect on the bilingual acquisition of Dutch gender. The fact that Greek
has a three-way gender system and the consistent and extensive marking of gender on all nominal
elements, including the noun itself together with the abundance of reliable morphological cues leads to an
enhanced awareness of grammatical gender in Greek children at early stages of their language
development. This is reflected in the performance of the Greek-Dutch bilingual children of the present
study and more specifically in their increased tendency to overgeneralize het to common nouns, which is
an error pattern that has hardly been attested in other bilingual populations and is largely absent in Dutch
monolinguals (at least during the early stages of gender acquisition). As a consequence, it was suggested
that the facilitative effect of the Greek gender system on the acquisition of Dutch gender may extend to
language-impaired bilingual populations, given that Greek monolingual children with SLI do not show
significant problems with gender agreement in Greek.
Although the findings of the present study point to a positive cross-linguistic influence from
Greek to Dutch, the results should be interpreted with caution due to several limitations of the study.
First, we did not test for statistical significance for the various differences between groups, tasks and
conditions. Moreover, the children were matched on a relatively general measure of language proficiency
(i.e. vocabulary score), but other variables that have been shown to be significant predictors of
performance on the gender tasks such as amount of exposure were not taken into account. Nevertheless,
the present study serves as a starting point for subsequent investigations of the acquisition of Dutch
gender in Greek-Dutch bilingual children that can be extended to language-impaired populations as well.
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74
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
TABLE WITH INPUT VARIABLES EXTRACTED FROM QUESTIONNAIRES.
Age of
onset
Greek
Age of
onset
Dutch
Length
of
Exposure
Greek
Length of
Exposure
Dutch
Years
living in
Greece
Years living
in NL
L1
Mother
L1
Father
Language
between
parents
Language
between
siblings
GR
Farsi
(NL)
GR
GR
GR
*GR
(50%50%)
GR
NL
NL
GR
GR
GR
NL
GR/NL
GR
GR
NL
NL
GR
GR
GR:20%
NL:80%
-
GR
GR/NL
GR
GR
PL
(ENG)
GR
ENG
GR
NL
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
Nr
Age
DVIQ
WBQ
type of
Bilingual
44
11;8
18
74
SUC
Birth
4;0
11;8
7;8
-
12;8
GR
51
1
43
35
9;6
5;2
9;2
7;9
11
11
15
21
80
81
81
83
SIM
SUC
SUC
SUC
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
2;3
2;0
6;1
9;6
5;2
9;2
7;9
9;6
2;11
7;2
1;8
2;3
1;0
6;1
9;6
2;11
8;2
1;8
GR
GR
GR
GR
47
11;4
9
84
SIM
Birth
Birth
11;4
11;4
-
11;4
NL
24
3
7;6
5;11
17
19
86
86
SIM
SUC
Birth
Birth
Birth
4;6
7;6
5;11
7;6
1;5
6;3
4;7
1;3
1;4
NL
GR
59
25
11;4
7;3
16
8
90
91
SIM
SIM
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
11;4
7;3
11;4
7;3
-
11;4
7;3
5
36
57
20
7
70
6;1
8;4
11;1
6;8
5;10
11;9
10
17
17
19
12
13
92
93
93
95
96
96
SIM
SUC
SUC
SUC
SUC
SUC
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
6;6
4;0
3;9
4;2
4;0
6;1
8;4
11;1
6;8
5;10
11;9
6;1
1;10
7;1
2;11
1;8
7;9
4;10
6;7 (GER)
3;0
3;9
4;2
-
1;3
1;9
8;1
2;11
1;8
11;9
GR/NL
GR/NL
GR:20%
NL:80%
GR/ENG
GR
GR/NL
GR
NL
75
*GR
(50%50%)
GR
GR
*GR
NL
NL
GR
NL
NL
GR/NL
NL
42
13
40
67
8;11
5;8
8;8
12;11
6
7
12
12
97
97
99
99
SIM
SIM
SIM
SIM
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
8;11
5;8
8;8
12;11
8;11
5;8
8;8
12;11
-
8;11
5;8
8;8
12;11
NL
NL
GR/NL
NL
55
68
34
41
75
38
76
12;3
13;3
7;5
9;0
8;8
8;3
4;4
20
14
20
18
15
10
5
102
104
105
108
109
110
111
SUC
SIM
SIM
SUC
SIM
SIM
SIM
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
4;0
Birth
Birth
2;6
Birth
Birth
Birth
12;3
13;3
7;5
9;0
8;8
8;3
4;4
8;3
13;3
7;5
6;6
8;8
8;3
4;4
3;5
7;0
0;4
3;7
8;8
13;3
0;9
8;8
5;11
8;3
0;9
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR
GR (ENG)
GR
NL
NL
GR (ENG)
GR/NL
GR/NL
NL
GR/NL
NL
NL
NL
54
12;2
11
111
SIM
Birth
Birth
12;2
12;2
-
12;2
GR
GR/NL
NL
GR
NL
NL
NL
*NL
(NL:75%
GR:25%)
GR
GR
NL
9
5;11
9
119
SIM
Birth
Birth
5;11
5;11
-
5;11
NL
NL
NL
29
7;0
9
119
SIM
Birth
Birth
7;0
7;0
-
7;0
ENG
GR/NL
58
10
61
11;3
5;11
11;5
6
8
19
120
126
132
SIM
SIM
SIM
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
Birth
11;3
5;11
11;5
11;3
5;11
11;5
-
11;3
5;11
11;5
GR
*GR
(50/50)
NL
GR
GR
PL
(ENG)
NL
GR
NL
NL
NL
NL
NL
NL
-
The * in the columns L1 mother/father indicates that the parent is speaking to the child (at least some of the time) in a language that is not his/her mother
tongue.
76
APPENDIX B
DUCTH TESTS –LIST OF TARGET NOUNS (n=18)
COMMON
baby
boom
fiets
telefoon
sleutel
klok
gitaar
helikopter
robot
baby
tree
bicycle
telephone
key
clock
guitar
helicopter
robot
NEUTER
huis
bad
raam
konijn
schaap
vliegtuig
hert
net
eiland
house
bath tub
window
rabbit
sheep
aeroplane
deer
net
island
77
APPENDIX C
GREEK TESTS – LIST OF TARGET NOUNS (n=18)
MASCULINE
skilos
vatrachos
ilios
elefantas
kuvas
karcharias
dog
frog
sun
elephant
bucket
shark
FEMININE
papia
bala
gata
zoni
tileorasi
vrisi
duck
ball
cat
belt
television
tap
NEUTER
vivlio
milo
tilefono
molivi
puli
psari
book
apple
telephone
pencil
bird
fish
78