Language external and language internal factors in the acquisition of gender: the case of Albanian-Greek and English-Greek bilingual children

ABSTRACT

The aim of this experimental study is to examine the development of gender assignment and gender agreement in bilingual Albanian-Greek and English-Greek children as well as the exploitation of gender cues on the noun ending in real and pseudo-nouns. Four gender tasks were designed, two targeting gender assignment (determiner + noun production) and two gender agreement (predicate adjective production). Performance is investigated in relation to the role of (positive) L1 transfer (Albanian vs. English), the role of the bilingual’s vocabulary knowledge in Greek as well the role of input factors including the monolingual/bilingual school contexts and the role of parental education as a proxy for socioeconomic status (SES). The results show a strong interaction between the bilinguals’ performance and their Greek vocabulary development and a negative link between gender accuracy and use of the other language.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• gender
• Greek
• English
• Albanian
• input effects

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria Kaltsa is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the area of Psycholinguistics at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (School of English) at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). She holds an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from AUTH. Her scientific interests involve multilingualism and language processing.

Alexandra Prentza is an adjunct Lecturer at the Linguistics Department (School of Philology) at the University of Ioannina. She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Essex and a PhD from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests concern second language acquisition, bilingualism, syntax and second language syntax.

Despina Papadopoulou is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics (School of Philology) at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research interests lie in language processing, language acquisition, language disorders, second language learning and teaching. She has also worked on bilingualism and the education of bilingual children.

Ianthi Maria Tsimpli is the Chair of English and Applied Linguistics at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She works on language development, language impairment, attrition, bilingualism, language processing and the interaction between language, cognitive abilities and print exposure.

Notes

1. Throughout the paper, when presenting our dataset we use the term L1 to refer either to Albanian or English, depending on the bilingual pairing, and L2 to refer to Greek since for the majority of our participants that was the order of exposure to these languages.

2. See Ralli (2005, 119) for further details.

3. Suffixes -o, -as, -is, -o have high predictive values as far as gender is concerned, because they are clearly associated with one gender feature, while suffix -i is associated with two gender features.

4. One reviewer noticed that, even though English does not mark grammatical gender, sex cues may be transferrable to Greek. However, our test items involve objects and animals and, thus, possible sex cues from English cannot be transferred into the gender of the Greek nouns.

5. In the results section (4.4) for brevity, Albanian-Greek bilinguals will be referred to as Albanian bilinguals and the English-Greek bilinguals as English bilinguals.

6. Lack of collinearity issues in our data, as confirmed by diagnostic tests conducted prior to the regression analysis, allowed us to proceed with the stepwise method.

7. Partial correlation scores (sr) show the individual contribution of each independent variable to the overall variance irrespective of the variance shared with other variables.

Additional information

Funding

This work was co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and the Greek national funds through the Operational Program ‘Education and Lifelong Learning’ of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: Thales. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund. Thales FP7 Project ‘Bilingual Acquisition & Bilingual Education: The Development of Linguistic & Cognitive Abilities in Different Types of Bilingualism’ (BALED – Award No MIS377313). PI: Ianthi Maria Tsimpli.