Gender attraction errors in child English INTRODUCTION Lucia Pozzan 12 Dorota Ramlogan 3 and Virginia Valian 13 1 CUNY Graduate Center 2 University of Pennsylvania ID: 494963
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His father’s daughter and her mother’s son: Gender attraction errors in child English
INTRODUCTION
Lucia Pozzan1,2, Dorota Ramlogan3, and Virginia Valian1,3
1CUNY Graduate Center, 2University of Pennsylvania, 3Hunter College – CUNY
MATERIALS & METHODS
THE PHENOMENONAdult L2 learners of English occasionally produce gender agreement errors on possessive pronouns, agreeing with the possessor rather than the possessee (Antón-Méndez (2010): Bob1 sent a present to his1 sister *Bob1 sent a present to her1 sister RESEARCH QUESTIONSAre errors due to non-target (Romance-like) grammars or are they speech errors? Are gender agreement errors on pronouns a general learner phenomenon, such that children learning English as their L1 also produce gender agreement errors? Do errors occur equally in match and mismatch conditions? Do errors occur equally with masculine and feminine nouns?Is masculine gender the default?
Gender Errors Match vs. Mismatch Female vs. Masculine At least some portion of the errors are speech errors:Children self-correct an incorrect response 20% of the time; they never change a correct responseThe same error occurs in adult native speakers (5-6%) (Slevc, et al., 2007)Gender errors are likely a speaker phenomenon, rather than an L1-transfer errorEven monolingual English-speaking children often incorrectly mark the gender of a possessive pronounGender errors are significantly more frequent when the possessor and the possessee mismatch in gender, indicating an attraction errorGender errors occur to a similar extent in the two mismatch conditionsMasculine gender is not the default; if anything, the reverse
RESULTS
Conclusions & Implications
Gender errors on possessive pronouns are at least in part a speaker phenomenon, not only a transfer phenomenonErrors may be due in part to an incorrect grammar, as well as to speech errorsIf so, the errors should surface in comprehension tasksNative adult input is not ambiguous, but possessive pronouns are low in token and type frequency, semantic scope, and perceptual salience (Collins et al., 2009)To the extent that the errors are speech errors, we should be able to determine where in the production process they occurAntón-Méndez, I. (2010). Whose? L2-English speakers’ possessive pronoun gender errors. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14, 318-331.Collins, L., Trofimovich, P., White, J., Cardoso, W., & Horst, M. (2009). Some input on the easy/difficult grammar question: An empirical study. Modern Language Journal, 93, 336-353. Slevc, L. R., Wardlow, L., & Ferreira, V. S. (2007). Pronoun production: World or word knowledge? MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 53, 191-203.
Participants14 monolingual English-speaking childrenMean age: 4;4 Task: Elicited production Materials: 12 prompts : Match Condition (female-female) Possessor – Possessee Mismatch Condition 1 (female-male) Possessor – Possessee Mismatch Condition 2 (male-female) Possessor – Possessee
References