Article published in:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 9:2 (2019) ► pp. 253–288

The development of gender assignment and agreement in English-Greek and German-Greek bilingual children

| Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
| University of Cambridge
| University College London

The aim of this experimental study is to examine the development of Greek gender in bilingual English-Greek and German-Greek children. Four gender production tasks were designed, two targeting gender assignment eliciting determiners and two targeting gender agreement eliciting predicate adjectives for real and novel nouns. Participant performance was assessed in relation to whether the ‘other’ language was a gender language or not (English vs. German) along with the role of the bilinguals’ Greek vocabulary knowledge and language input. The results are argued to contribute significantly to disentangling the role of crosslinguistic influence in gender assignment and agreement by bringing together a variety of input measures such as early and current amount of exposure to Greek, the role of area of residence (i.e. whether Greek is the minority or the majority language), the effect of maternal education and the amount of exposure to Greek in a school setting.

Keywords: Greek gender, crosslinguistic influence, input measures, vocabulary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Acquisition of gender in bilingual children
    • 2.1Greek gender
    • 2.2German gender
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants and background variables
    • 4.2Tasks & procedure
    • 4.3Predictions
  • 5Results
    • 5.1Gender assignment
    • 5.2Gender agreement
    • 5.3The role of lexical skills
    • 5.4Predictors of gender accuracy
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16033.kal
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