Cover not available
Part of
The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun
[Studies in Bilingualism 63] 2022
► pp. 243–272

Chapter 10
Prediction on the basis of gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children

 | University of Milan-Bicocca
 | University of Milan-Bicocca
 | University Putra Malaysia
 | University of Milan-Bicocca
 | University of Milan-Bicocca
The present study used a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate online processing of grammatical gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children, in comparison to monolingual Italian children. We examined how children anticipated upcoming nouns on the basis of grammatical gender and number information on the preceding article. While monolingual speakers are able to employ such predictive mechanisms from a very young age, to our knowledge, this is the first study that compares gender and number processing in bilingual children. The results show that, overall, participants made linguistic predictions on the basis of articles, although a post-hoc analysis focusing on a subset of our bilingual participants did not confirm the prediction effect in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children. We found a greater difference in the bilingual group than in the monolingual group, in that bilinguals tended to be slower when processing gender than number. Finally, we found that L2 proficiency had a significant effect on gender processing in the bilingual group. One interpretation of these findings is that the discrepancy between gender and number may be due to transfer, since Mandarin does not have grammatical gender while it does have a conceptual notion of number. Another factor may be L2 proficiency, and especially lexical knowledge, since gender is an arbitrary property stored in the lexicon, while number is concretely linked to the referential context.
Keywords: visual world paradigm, gender, number, child bilingualism, predictive processing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Processing of grammatical gender
    • 2.2Processing of number
    • 2.3The discrepancy between gender and number
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Hypotheses and predictions
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Task and materials
    • 3.4Procedure
    • 3.5Analysis
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 20 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.10bos
References (63)
References
Altmann, G. T. (2011). The mediation of eye movements by spoken language. In S. Liversedge, I. Gilchrist, & S. Everling (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of eye movements (pp. 979–1004). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Altmann, G. T., & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: Restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73(3), 247–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Antón-Méndez, I., Nicol, J. L., & Garrett, M. F. (2002). The relation between gender and number agreement processing. Syntax, 5(1), 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Audacity Team. (2020). Audacity(R): Free audio editor and recorder [Computer application].Google Scholar
Ayoun, D., & Maranzana, S. (2020). Italian grammatical gender: A corpus study from a second language acquisition perspective. Italica, 97(2), 306–333.Google Scholar
Barber, H., & Carreiras, M. (2003). Integrating gender and number information in Spanish word pairs: An ERP study. Cortex, 39(3), 465–482. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2005). Grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish: an ERP comparison. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(1), 137–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bosch, J. E., & Foppolo, F. (submitted). Predictive processing of grammatical gender in bilingual children: The effect of cross-linguistic incongruence and language dominance.
Carreiras, M., Carr, L., Barber, H. A., & Hernandez, A. (2010). Where syntax meets math: Right intraparietal sulcus activation in response to grammatical number agreement violations. NeuroImage, 49(2), 1741–1749. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chini, M. (1995). Grammatiche a confronto: La categoria grammaticale del genere nella competenza di nativi italofoni e nelle interlingue di apprendenti dell’italiano come L2. In P. Desideri (Ed.), L’universo delle lingue. Confrontare lingue e grammatiche nella scuola (pp. 277–294). Quaderni del Giscel, La Nuova Italia.Google Scholar
Cholewa, J., Neitzel, I., Bürsgens, A., & Günther, T. (2019). Online-processing of grammatical gender in noun-phrase decoding: An eye-tracking study with monolingual German 3rd and 4th graders. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2586. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cole, P., & Segui, J. (1994). Grammatical incongruency and vocabulary types. Memory & Cognition, 22(4), 387–394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbett, G. G. (2000). Number. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corrêa, L. S., Augusto, M. R., & Ferrari-Neto, J. (2005). The early processing of number agreement in the DP: Evidence from the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. Talk given at the 30th Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston.
Dahan, D., Swingley, D., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Magnuson, J. S. (2000). Linguistic gender and spoken-word recognition in French. Journal of memory and Language, 42(4), 465–480. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dink, J. W., & Ferguson, B. (2015). EyetrackingR: An R library for eye-tracking data analysis. Retrieved on 11 June from [URL]
Dispaldro, M., Ruggiero, A., & Scali, F. (2015). Real-time comprehension of gender and number in four-to seven-year-old children: A study of the relationship between Italian clitic pronouns and visual picture referents. Journal of Child Language, 42(4), 917–931. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dussias, P. E., Kroff, J. R. V., Tamargo, R. E. G., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(2), 353–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faussart, C., Jakubowicz, C., & Costes, M. (1999). Gender and number processing in spoken French and Spanish. Rivista di Linguistica, 11(1), 75–101.Google Scholar
Fedden, S., & Corbett, G. G. (2017). Gender and classifiers in concurrent systems: Refining the typology of nominal classification. Glossa, 2(1), 1–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feigenson, L., & Carey, S. (2005). On the limits of infants’ quantification of small object arrays. Cognition, 97(3), 295–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ferrari, A., & Zampese, L. (2016). Grammatica: Parole, frasi, testi dell’italiano. Carocci.Google Scholar
Foucart, A., & Frenck-Mestre, C. (2011). Grammatical gender processing in L2: electrophysiological evidence of the effect of L1–L2 syntactic similarity. Bilingualism:Language and Cognition, 14(3), 379–399. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012). Can late L2 learners acquire new grammatical features? Evidence from ERPs and eye-tracking. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(1), 226–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frankowsky, M., & Ke, D. (2016). Humanness and classifiers in Mandarin Chinese. Language and Cognitive Science, 2(1), 55–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(2), 78–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gabriele, A., Fiorentino, R., & Bañón, J. A. (2013). Examining second language development using event-related potentials: A cross-sectional study on the processing of gender and number agreement. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3(2), 213–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gillon-Dowens, M., Vergara, M., Barber, H. A., & Carreiras, M. (2010). Morphosyntactic processing in late second-language learners. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1870–1887. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gillon-Dowens, M., Guo, T., Guo, J., Barber, H., & Carreiras, M. (2011). Gender and number processing in Chinese learners of Spanish–evidence from event related potentials. Neuropsychologia, 49(7), 1651–1659. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28(2), 191–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guillelmon, D., & Grosjean, F. (2001). The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals. Memory & Cognition, 29(3), 503–511. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, J. W. (1991). The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22(1), 27–62.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (2018). Toward a new conceptual framework for comparing gender systems and some so-called classifier systems. Talk presented at Stockholm University, Department of Linguistics on 13 April.Google Scholar
Hopp, H. (2012). The on-line integration of inflection in L2 processing: Predictive processing of German gender. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 226–245). Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hopp, H., & Lemmerth, N. (2018). Lexical and syntactic congruency in L2 predictive gender processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(1), 171–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huang, C. R., & Ahrens, K. (2003). Individuals, kinds and events: classifier coercion of nouns. Language Science, 25(4), 353–373. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Igoa, J. M., García-Albea, J. E., & Sánchez-Casas, R. (1999). Gender-number dissociations in sentence production in Spanish. Rivista di Linguistica, 11(1), 163–196.Google Scholar
Iljic, R. (1994). Quantification in Mandarin Chinese: Two markers of plurality. Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kouider, S., Halberda, J., Wood, J., & Carey, S. (2006). Acquisition of English number marking: The singular-plural distinction. Language Learning and Development, 2(1), 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lemmerth, N., & Hopp, H. (2019). Gender processing in simultaneous and successive bilingual children: cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences. Language Acquisition, 26(1): 21–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 18(3), 193–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009). Fluency in using morphosyntactic cues to establish reference: How do native and non-native speakers differ? In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, & G-M. Rheiner (Eds), Proceedings of the 33rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 290–301). Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
(2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(4), 447–464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, P., Ogura, T., Barner, D., Yang, S. J., & Carey, S. (2009). Does the conceptual distinction between singular and plural sets depend on language? Developmental Psychology, 45(6): 1644–1653. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lukatela, G., Carello, C., & Turvey, M. T. (1987). Lexical representation of regular and irregular inflected nouns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 2(1): 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mani, N. & Huettig, F. (2012). Prediction during language processing is a piece of cake – but only for skilled producers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(4), 843–847.Google Scholar
Morales, L., Paolieri, D., Dussias, P. E., Kroff, J. R. V., Gerfen, C., & Bajo, M. T. (2016). The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(2), 294–310. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padovani, R., & Cacciari, C. (2003). Il ruolo della trasparenza morfologica nel riconoscimento di parole in Italiano. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia 30(4), 749–772.Google Scholar
Panzini, A. (2017). Grammatica italiana. Edizioni Lindau.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Ritter, E. (1993). Where’s gender? Linguistic Inquiry, 24(4), 795–803.Google Scholar
Robertson, E. K., Shi, R., & Melançon, A. (2012). Toddlers use the number feature in determiners during online noun comprehension. Child Development, 83(6), 2007–2018. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rossi, S., Gugler, M. F., Friederici, A. D., & Hahne, A. (2006). The impact of proficiency on syntactic second-language processing of German and Italian: Evidence from event related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(12), 2030–2048. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rullmann, H., & You, A. (2006). General number and the semantics and pragmatics of indefinite bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese. In K. von Heusinger & K. Turner (Eds.), Where semantics meets pragmatics (pp. 175–196). Brill.Google Scholar
Sá-Leite, A. R., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2019). Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1148–1173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stella, G., Pizzoli, C., & Tressoldi, P. E. (2000). Il Peabody Test. Test di vocabolario recettivo. Omega.Google Scholar
Tokowicz, N., & MacWhinney, B. (2005). Implicit and explicit measures of sensitivity to violations in second language grammar: An event-related potential investigation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 27(2), 173–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Heugten, M., & Shi, R. (2009). French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition. Developmental Science, 12(3), 419–425. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowska–Macgregor, M., & Leung, Y. K. I. (2004). Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25(1), 105–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wicha, N. Y., Moreno, E. M., & Kutas, M. (2004). Anticipating words and their gender: An event-related brain potential study of semantic integration, gender expectancy, and gender agreement in Spanish sentence reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(7), 1272–1288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wickham, H. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zhang, N. N. (2014). Expressing number productively in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics, 52(1): 1–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Baron, Alisa, Katrina Connell, Daniel Kleinman, Lisa M. Bedore & Zenzi M. Griffin
2024. Grammatical gender in spoken word recognition in school-age Spanish monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology 15 DOI logo
Bosch, Jasmijn E. & Francesca Foppolo
2024. Prediction during spoken language processing in monolingual and multilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:4 ► pp. 512 ff. DOI logo
Meir, Natalia, Olga Parshina & Irina A. Sekerina
2024. Prediction in bilingual sentence processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:4 ► pp. 544 ff. DOI logo
van Dijk, Chantal, Jasmijn Bosch & Sharon Unsworth
2024. Language processing in bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:4 ► pp. 435 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.