The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender of Determiners in Danish Monolingual and Bilingual Children: An experimental study

Bidragets oversatte titel: Danske et- og tosprogede børns tilegnelse af bestemmeres grammatiske køn: En eksperimentel undersøgelse

Frans Gregersen*, Leonie Cornips, Ditte Boeg Thomsen

*Corresponding author af dette arbejde

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelForskningpeer review

2 Citationer (Scopus)
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Abstract

This paper examines the acquisition of grammatical gender of indefinite and definite DPs in Danish. It investigates which grammatical contexts further acquisition and which slow it down, and whether distinguishing between monolinguals and bilinguals makes a difference. Danish has a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), fusing gender with definiteness in the DP. In order to answer our research questions, we tested monolingual and bilingual Danish-speaking children (n=72) from different age groups using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a Picture Description Task, and a Story Task. A generalized linear mixed effects regression analysis of the results showed that i) the children produced the Standard Danish determiner significantly more often with common than with neuter nouns; ii) the children produced significantly more Standard Danish gender marking in simple DPs than in complex DPs; iii) the children produced significantly more expressions with definite determiners realized as suffixes than with indefinite determiners expressed as prenominal articles in accordance with conventional norms; and iv) bilingual children produced significantly less Standard Danish gender marking than their monolingual peers, but ceiling effects in the monolingual group made it impossible to examine interactions between group and grammatical context.
Bidragets oversatte titelDanske et- og tosprogede børns tilegnelse af bestemmeres grammatiske køn: En eksperimentel undersøgelse
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftJournal of Germanic Linguistics
Vol/bind33
Udgave nummer2
Sider (fra-til)147-178
Antal sider32
ISSN1470-5427
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 7 maj 2021

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