Chapter published in:
The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectivesEdited by Dalila Ayoun
[Studies in Bilingualism 63] 2022
► pp. 243–272
Chapter 10Prediction on the basis of gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children
Jasmijn E. Bosch | University of Milan-Bicocca
Mathilde Chailleux | University of Milan-Bicocca
Jia’en Yee | University Putra Malaysia
Maria Teresa Guasti | University of Milan-Bicocca
Fabrizio Arosio | 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
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.10bos
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.63.10bos
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