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Typical and Impaired Processing in Morphosyntax
Edited by Vincent Torrens
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 64] 2020
► pp. 153–174

Processing of pronoun gender by Dutch-Russian simultaneous bilinguals

Evidence from eye-tracking

| University of Utrecht
| Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
| Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
| Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia
| University of Utrecht

This paper investigates the processing of pronoun gender by bilingual children. Prior research shows that Dutch–Russian bilinguals below age 7 often make gender agreement errors in Russian anaphoric pronouns, whereas monolingual children are target-like by age 4. This paper aims to establish whether the frequent production errors in the speech of bilinguals are due to lacking knowledge of grammatical gender or due to incidental performance breakdowns. The results of an eye-tracking experiment demonstrate that 5–6-year-old Dutch-Russian bilinguals are sensitive to gender cues, but are slower than Russian monolingual peers and adults in pronoun resolution. The findings support the view that bilinguals possess abstract grammatical representations, but are less efficient in gender production and processing due to competition cost in bilingualism.

Keywords: bilingualism, comprehension-production asymmetries, grammatical gender, anaphorical pronouns, online processing, eye-tracking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The present study
  • 3.Grammatical gender in Russian
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Apparatus
    • 4.4Procedure
    • 4.5Analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Adult participants
    • 5.2.Monolingual children
    • 5.3Bilingual children
    • 5.4Summary of the results
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 21 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.64.08tri
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