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ERIC Number: EJ1079109
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Oct
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
EISSN: N/A
Natural Gender, Phonological Cues and the Default Grammatical Gender in French Children
Boloh, Yves; Ibernon, Laure
First Language, v33 n5 p449-468 Oct 2013
According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns' gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4- to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender attribution choices on natural gender, they did not base them on phonology either: the masculine was the dominant choice. These results thus provide additional support to the "masculine as default" view of French nouns' gender acquisition proposed by the authors in an earlier study. The present article considers how the developmental conditions of children's initial computations might bias their tallies towards a higher type frequency for masculine nouns, which could contribute to launching this gender as the default.
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2814
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: France
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A