Productivity and the Acquisition of Gender
Sigríður Björnsdóttir
February 2021 

Children’s differing learning trajectories cross-linguistically have been at the forefront of gender acquisition research, often with conflicting results and conclusions. As a result, the source of children’s different learning behaviors in gender acquisition has been unclear. I argue that children’s gender acquisition is driven by the search for productive patterns. First, I provide corpus studies where the predictions of a learning model (Yang, 2016) are formulated. Second, I report the results of an elicited production task on Icelandic-speaking children (N = 26, ages 2;6-6;3 years) and adults (N = 18) that puts these predictions to test. The results suggest that Icelandic-speaking children and adults draw a categorical distinction between productive and unproductive suffixes in Icelandic gender assignment. I discuss the implications of these findings for morphological learning beyond gender acquisition.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005533 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Journal of Child Language (2021)
keywords:	gender, morphology, rules, defaults, productivity, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [October 2020]
Downloaded:	855 times

 

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