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The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun
[Studies in Bilingualism 63] 2022
► pp. 209–242

Chapter 9
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual grammars

Evidence from gender assignment in unilingual Dutch and mixed speech

| Heritage Linguistics Lab, HERLING | UiT The Arctic University of Norway
| Heritage Linguistics Lab, HERLING | Leiden University, Centre for Linguistics, LUCL
| Heritage Linguistics Lab, HERLING | Leiden University, Centre for Linguistics, LUCL
| Heritage Linguistics Lab, HERLING | Leiden University, Centre for Linguistics, LUCL | Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, LIBC
| Heritage Linguistics Lab, HERLING | Leiden University, Centre for Linguistics, LUCL
| Heritage Linguistics Lab, HERLING | UiT The Arctic University of Norway | Leiden University, Institute for Area Studies, LIAS

This study reports on grammatical gender assignment in elicited production data from heritage speakers of Turkish, Papiamento, and Spanish in the Netherlands. We investigate the role of cross-linguistic influence from the heritage language onto the societal language by comparing three heritage languages that differ in terms of the properties of the nominal domain, including gender. Determiner-adjective-noun constructions were elicited by means of a Director-Matcher task (Gullberg, Indefrey, & Muysken, 2009), which was performed both in a unilingual Dutch mode, and in a code-switching mode from Dutch to the heritage language. The results show that all groups tend to overgeneralize the common gender in the Dutch unilingual mode. Strikingly, the performance of heritage speakers of Spanish was more target-like than the Papiamento and Turkish speakers, which may be due to the fact that Spanish is the only language that has a grammatical gender system. In code-switching mode, most speakers tend to assign common gender to inserted nouns, but some speakers also apply a gender assignment strategy based on the translation equivalent of the noun in Dutch, or produce a postnominal adjective construction with an uninflected adjective. An analysis of extra-linguistic variables demonstrated that gender assignment strategies seem to be determined to some extent by the degree of dominance in the societal language.

Keywords: cross-linguistic influence, bilingualism, code switching, grammatical gender
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The nominal domain in Dutch, Spanish, Turkish and Papiamento
  • 3.The Turkish-, Spanish- and Papiamento-speaking communities in the Netherlands
  • 4.Dutch gender in bilinguals
  • 5.Gender in code-switching
  • 6.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 7.Methodology
    • 7.1Procedure
    • 7.2Materials
    • 7.3Participants
    • 7.4Coding
  • 8.Analysis and results
    • 8.1Unilingual Dutch mode
      • 8.1.1Extralinguistic variables
    • 8.2Code-switching mode
      • 8.2.1Extralinguistic variables
  • 9.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.09van
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Cited by (3)

Cited by 3 other publications

van Osch, Brechje, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Ivo Boers & Bo Sterken
2023. Adjective position in the code-switched speech of Spanish and Papiamento heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Individual differences and methodological considerations. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo
Bellamy, Kate & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2022. Chapter 2. Gender assignment in mixed noun phrases. In The Acquisition of Gender [Studies in Bilingualism, 63], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Greidanus Romaneli, Miriam, Ivo H. G. Boers & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2021. Gender in Dutch/Portuguesecodeswitching. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 35 ► pp. 131 ff. DOI logo

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