Structural and phonological cues for gender assignment in monolingual and bilingual children acquiring German. Experiments with real and nonce words

Abstract

In this study, we investigate gender marking on German real and nonce words by monolingual children as well as German-Russian children, who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask whether the children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender or rely on their lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed three experiments. Experiment 1 tests gender assignment on real nouns; Experiment 2 tests gender assignment to nonce nouns, and Experiment 3 tests nonce nouns, contrasting phonological and structural (agreement) cues. Results show that children are less successful when assigning gender to nonce nouns as compared to real nouns, and that they are less sensitive to phonological cues than to syntactic cues. Bilingual children show similar patterns are monolingual children but different default strategies. For the bilingual children, we discuss the possibility of cue transfer from Russian to German.