Gender Assignment Strategies Among Simultaneous Spanish/English Bilingual Children from Miami, Florida

Osmer Balam · Usha Lakshmanan · M. Carmen Parafita Couto

28 citations0/0 files storedStudies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

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Language Development and Disorders EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

Abstract

Abstract We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals (n = 1774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions (n = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (second graders vs. fifth graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, Brian. 2000.The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), were collected by Pearson, Barbara Z. 2002. Narrative competence among monolingual and bilingual school children in Miami. In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.),Language and literacy in bilingual children, 135–174. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Results revealed that in Spanish nominal constructions, children across both instructional programs and grade levels evinced native-like acquisition of grammatical gender. In mixed nominals, children overwhelmingly assigned the masculine gender to English nouns. Notably, irrespective of schooling background, simultaneous Spanish/English bilingual children used the masculine default gender strategy when assigning gender to English nouns with feminine translation equivalents. This suggests that from age seven, simultaneous Spanish/English child bilingual acquisition of grammatical gender is characterized by a predisposition towards the employment of the masculine default gender strategy in bilingual speech.

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2000Concord in Minimalist Theory 1991The acquisition of gender: what Spanish children tell us 2007Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English Bilingual Children 2002Making a minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the Matrix Language 2007Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: A view from child and adult functional–lexical mixings 1982Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome 2015Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach 1999Loss of Gender Agreement in L1 Attrition: Preliminary Results

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