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Language Acquisition Beyond Parameters: Studies in honour of Juana M. Liceras
Edited by Anahí Alba de la Fuente, Elena Valenzuela and Cristina Martínez Sanz
[Studies in Bilingualism 51] 2016
► pp. 237–279

The acquisition of grammatical gender in L1 bilingual Spanish

| University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab
| University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab
| University of Valladolid Language Acquisition Lab

We analyze the emergence of grammatical gender in the spontaneous longitudinal Spanish production of a set of Spanish/English bilingual twins from the FerFuLice corpus (Fernández Fuertes & Liceras, 2009). We take as a point of departure theoretical accounts on gender assignment and gender concord and previous empirical work on the acquisition of gender by monolinguals and bilinguals. Our study deals with how gender incorporates in the case of L1 Spanish bilinguals; how concord within the determiner phrase (DP) operates; and how monolingual and bilingual Spanish pattern in the same way in this respect. We conclude that DP syntax and the gender concord valuation mechanism are in place from very early stages and that morphology and semantics are not determinant factors in this process.

Keywords: DP syntax, grammatical gender, gender features, bilingual Spanish, gender concord
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Spanish grammatical gender
    • 2.1The structure of gender: Semantics, morphology, phonology and syntax
    • 2.2A model of gender assignment and gender concord in the DP
    • 2.3Gender internalized system
  • 3.The acquisition of grammatical gender
  • 4.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Data selection
    • 5.3Data codification
    • 5.4Data analysis and discussion
      • 5.4.1Overview of the data and adult-like cases
      • 5.4.2The three dimensions of gender and non-adult-like cases
      • 5.4.3Developmental approach
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.51.10fue
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