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Acquisition of gender agreement depends on frequency distributions in specific contexts

Mazara, Jekatarina; Loporcaro, Michele; Stoll, Sabine (2024). Acquisition of gender agreement depends on frequency distributions in specific contexts. In: Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam, 24 July 2024 - 27 July 2024. UC Merced, 2496-2502.

Abstract

Learning to understand and use agreement is an integral part of children's linguistic development. In Romance languages, this includes gender and number agreement between the controller and attributive or predicative adjectives or participles. We examine the development of this category in a case where children's task is complicated by syncretisms, multiple paradigms, and unequal input distributions. Romansh Tuatschin (Romance, Indo-European, Switzerland) presents children with two distinct paradigms for attributive (masculine and feminine only) and predicative (masculine, feminine, and neuter/unmarked) contexts of adjective and participle use. The masculine form in predicative use is the same as the neuter form in attributive usage. Thus the masculine form in these two paradigms differs. This could be challenging for the language learner. The distribution of these forms is heavily skewed towards the neuter in predicative contexts but balanced in attributives. Examining production errors in children between 2;0 and 4;3, we evaluate the effects of frequency and syncretism and find that error-rate is affected by skewed distributions and less affected by syncretisms. This demonstrates the strong effect of input distributions on first language acquisition.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper), refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Romance Studies
06 Faculty of Arts > Department of Comparative Language Science
Special Collections > NCCR Evolving Language
Special Collections > Centers of Competence > Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution
Dewey Decimal Classification:490 Other languages
890 Other literatures
410 Linguistics
Uncontrolled Keywords:language acquisition, gender agreement, Romansh Tuatschin
Language:English
Event End Date:27 July 2024
Deposited On:15 Jul 2024 07:50
Last Modified:20 Jul 2024 23:03
Publisher:UC Merced
Series Name:Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Number:46
ISSN:1069-7977
OA Status:Green
Free access at:Official URL. An embargo period may apply.
Official URL:https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16b5s7hq
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