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A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2012

YULIA RODINA  and
MARIT WESTERGAARD
YULIA RODINA*
Affiliation:
University of Tromsø – CASTL
MARIT WESTERGAARD
Affiliation:
University of Tromsø – CASTL
*
*Address for correspondence: Yulia Rodina, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, University of Tromso, NO-9037 Tromso, Norway; e-mail: yulia.rodina@uit.no
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Abstract

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6–4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children rely on certain morphosyntactic micro-cues in the course of acquisition of semantic agreement. A discrepancy is observed in the acquisition of semantic agreement across the different noun classes, and this suggests that children are highly sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and morphology and use detailed input information to make specific inferences concerning the gender of different noun classes. Furthermore, we argue that acquisition data may provide a more accurate account of how gender assignment proceeds in the mind of a speaker than has been traditionally assumed by gender assignment theories.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 5 , November 2012 , pp. 1077 - 1106
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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