Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-lcgwf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-16T18:48:24.628Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender-marked determiners help Dutch learners' word recognition when gender information itself does not*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2010

MARIEKE VAN HEUGTEN  and
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
MARIEKE VAN HEUGTEN*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Marieke van Heugten, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road N., Mississauga, ON, L5L 1C6, Canada. e-mail: marieke.vanheugten@utoronto.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use articles during sentence comprehension in a fashion comparable to similarly aged English learners. That is, Dutch learners' sentence processing was impaired when a nonsense (se) as opposed to real article (de, het) preceded target words, much like English learners' sentence processing is disrupted by the use of a nonsense article. At the same time, however, gender cues did not help Dutch learners recognize target nouns more efficiently, indicating that gender has yet to be acquired. Thus, although Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 have not mastered all aspects of their language's article system, they nonetheless use their partial knowledge of articles during speech processing.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 87 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank all the families that participated, Angela Khadar, Margret van Beuningen, Sara Bögels, Ellen Westrek and Monique Diks for their assistance with recruitment, preparing, running and coding this study, as well as Joost van de Weijer for the use of his corpus. This research was funded by an NWO Spinoza Grant entitled ‘Native and Non-native Listening’, awarded to Anne Cutler. Parts of this research were presented at the 12th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (Nijmegen, the Netherlands, August 2006) and at the 31st Boston University Conference on Language Development (Boston, MA, November 2006).

References

REFERENCES

Brown, R. (1973). A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christophe, A., Millotte, S., Bernal, S. & Lidz, J. (2008). Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition. Language and Speech 51, 61–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, E. V. (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991) Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demuth, K., Culbertson, J. & Alter, J. (2006). Word-minimality, epenthesis, and coda licensing in the acquisition of English. Language and Speech 49, 137–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Echols, C. H. & Newport, E. L. (1992). The role of stress and position in determining first words. Language Acquisition 2, 189–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerken, L. A., Landau, B. & Remez, R. E. (1990). Function morphemes in young children's speech perception and production. Developmental Psychology 26, 204–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerken, L. A. & McIntosh, B. (1993). The interplay of function morphemes and prosody in early language. Developmental Psychology 29, 448–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleitman, L. R. & Wanner, E. (1982). Language acquisition: The state of the art. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: The state of the art, 3–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Höhle, B., Weissenborn, J., Kiefer, D., Schulz, A. & Schmitz, M. (2004). Functional elements in infants' speech processing: The role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements. Infancy 5, 341–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. K. (2005a). English-learning infants' representations of word forms with iambic stress. Infancy 7, 99–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, E. K. (2005b). Grammatical gender and early word recognition in Dutch. In Brugos, A., Clark-Cotton, M. R. & Ha, S. (eds), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development: Vol. 1, 320–30. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. K. & Diks, M. (2005). On-line processing of grammatical gender in Dutch-learning toddlers. Paper presented at the Xth International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin, Germany.Google Scholar
Kedar, Y., Casasola, M. & Lust, B. (2006). Getting there faster: 18- and 24-month-old infants' use of function words to determine reference. Child Development 77, 325–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lew-Williams, C. & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science 18, 193–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Morgan, J. L., Shi, R. & Allopenna, P. (1996). Perceptual bases of rudimentary grammatical categories: Toward a broader conceptualization of bootstrapping. In Morgan, J. L. & Demuth, K. (eds), Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, 263–83. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Rozendaal, M. I. & Baker, A. E. (2008). A cross-linguistic investigation of the acquisition of the pragmatics of indefinite and definite reference in two-year-olds. Journal of Child Language 35, 773–807.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shi, R., Cutler, A., Werker, J. & Cruickshank, M. (2006). Frequency and form as determinants of functor sensitivity in English-acquiring infants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119, EL61–EL67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shi, R. & Lepage, M. (2008). The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants. Developmental Science 11, 407–413.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shipley, E., Smith, C. & Gleitman, L. (1969). A study in the acquisition of language. Language 45, 322–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taelman, H., Durieux, G. & Gillis, S. (2009). Fillers as signs of distributional learning. Journal of Child Language 36, 323–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van der Velde, M. (2003). Déterminants et pronoms en néerlandais et en français: syntaxe et acquisition. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Université de Paris 8, Paris.Google Scholar
Van Heugten, M. & Shi, R. (2009). French-learning toddlers process gender information on determiners in word comprehension. Developmental Science 12, 419–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wijnen, F. & Verrips, M. (1998). The acquisition of Dutch syntax. In Gillis, S. & De Houwer, A. (eds), The acquisition of Dutch, 223–99. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zangl, R. & Fernald, A. (2007). Increasing flexibility in children's online processing of grammatical and nonce determiners in fluent speech. Language Learning and Development 3, 199–231.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed