THE ACQUISITION OF GENDER AND DECLENSION CLASS IN A NON-TRANSPARENT SYSTEM: MONOLINGUALS AND BILINGUALS

Yulia Rodina & Marit Westergaard

Abstract. This article presents a corpus study of the acquisition of grammatical gender in Norwegian in two monolingual and two bilingual Norwegian-English children. Gender in Norwegian is expressed as agreement between the noun and other targets such as determiners and adjectives, while definiteness and plurality are expressed as suffixes on the noun itself, i.e. as part of the declension. Furthermore, the gender system is characterized by relatively opaque gender assignment, suggesting that there may be a delay in the acquisition process compared to languages with more transparent systems. Our results show that, while the acquisition of suffixed forms is unproblematic, the children experience considerable problems with gender agreement. Moreover, there is generally no qualitative difference between the monolingual and bilingual children. These findings are discussed in relation to a number of issues: gender vs. declension class, the role of frequency, knowledge of the concept of gender, and monolingual vs. bilingual acquisition.

1. Introduction

The goal of this paper is to study the acquisition of the gender system in Norwegian at an early stage, i.e. before the age of three. We investigate the development of grammatical gender in corpus data from two monolingual and two bilingual Norwegian-English children, mainly focusing on two aspects of the gender system. First, gender in Norwegian is expressed as agreement between a noun and other targets (e.g. determiners and adjectives) and as declensional suffixes expressing definiteness and plurality in addition to gender. For example, while the indefinite article is a free morpheme, e.g.ei bok ‘a book’, the definite article is a suffix, e.g. boka ‘the book’. There is also adouble definite form (required when the noun is modified), displaying both a prenominal determiner and a suffix, e.g. den nye boka ‘the new book’.Second, grammatical gender in Norwegian is relatively opaque, in the sense that the gender of most nouns cannot be inferred from the shape of the noun itself and has to be learned for individual lexical items. This means that input frequency is expected to play animportant role in the acquisition process. Compared to what has been found in studies of the acquisition of languages with more transparent gender systems such as Italian or Russian (Kupisch et al. 2002, Gvozdev 1961), where gender agreement is often found to be in place from early on, the acquisition of target-consistent gender agreement may take somewhat longer in Norwegian. This should especially be the case in bilingual situations, since bilingual children typically have comparatively less input in Norwegian than monolingual children. Children who are learning English simultaneously with Norwegian may also be slower in acquiring the concept of grammatical gender, since this is not present on nouns in English at all.

Our main findings show that the acquisition of gender expressed on suffixes (the definite singular article and the definite and indefinite plural forms) is relatively unproblematic for the children, whether they are monolingual or bilingual. In comparison, the production of gender agreement, especially the indefinite article,shows a considerable delay, as some of the children are found to massively overgeneralize the masculine. In the double definite forms, we also find several cases of omission in the child data. Due to great individual variation across the four children, we cannot distinguish any clear qualitative differences between the monolinguals and the bilinguals.

2. The gender system of Norwegian (Tromsø dialect)

Norwegian generally has a three-gender system, distinguishing between masculine, feminine and neuter.[1]According to Trosterud (2001), masculine nouns constitute 52%, feminine nouns 32%, and neuter nouns only 16% of all nouns in the Nynorsk Dictionary (based on a total of 31,500 nouns). While we have not studied this specifically, this distribution should generally correspond tothe situation in the dialect that the children in this study are exposed to (Tromsø).

As shown in Table 1, the Tromsø dialect makes a three-way gender distinction. Gender is expressed on indefinite and definite articles, possessive and demonstrative determiners, as well as on some adjectives. Indefinite articles are free morphemes (e.g. en hest ‘a horse’) while definite articles are bound (e.g. hesten ‘horse-the’). In addition there are double definite forms, where a free prenominal determiner is combined with a bound definite article, e.g. den hesten, ‘that horse-the’. Double definiteness is required when the noun is demonstrative or modified by an adjective. Adjectives only express gender in the indefinite singular, with a distinction between masculine and feminine on the one hand (i.e. common gender) and neuter on the other (e.g. fin ‘nice.m/f vs. fint ‘nice.n’). Only one exceptional adjective, liten/lita/lite ‘little/small’, distinguishes between all three genders.

Table 1. The gender system of the Tromsø dialect[2]

Gender / Masculine / Feminine / Neuter
SG / Indefinite / en hest a horse / ei seng a bed / et hus a house
Definite / hesten horse-the / sengabed-the / huset house-the
Double
Definite / den hesten
that horse-the / den senga
that bed-the / det huset
that house-the
Adjective / en fin hest
a nice horse / ei fin seng
a nice bed / et fint hus
a nice house
en liten hest
a small horse / ei lita seng
a small bed / et lite hus
a small house
Possessive / min hest/hesten min
my horse / mi seng/senga mi
my bed / mitthus/huset mitt
my house
PL / Indefinite / hesta
horses / senge
beds / hus
houses
Definite / hestan
horses-the / sengen
beds-the / husan
houses-the
Adjective / fine hesta
nice horses / fine senge
nice beds / fine hus
nice houses
Possessive / minehesta/
hestanmine
my horses / mine senge/ sengenmine
my beds / mine hus/
husanmine
my houses

There is one group of feminine nouns in the Tromsø dialect that behave differently from the noun presented in Table 1. These nouns end in -a and are often referred to as bare definites (cf. e.g. Anderssen 2006), as they appear in the same form in the indefinite and definite singular, e.g.ei jenta – jenta ‘a girl – the girl’. In many other dialects of Norwegian, as well as in the written standards Bokmål and Nynorsk, these nouns end in –e, and there is thus alternation between the indefinite and definite forms, ei jente – jenta. As discussed in Anderssen (2006:207), some speakers of the Tromsø dialect alternate between the indefinite forms eijente/eijenta.This may also be true for the children in our study and hence cause some uncertainty in our analysis of the data. We return to this in section 6.

Gender assignment in Norwegian has traditionally been viewed as arbitrary, since gender is not manifested on the phonological form of the noun itself.It has also been argued that a large number of idiosyncratic assignment rules cover small classes of nouns (Trosterud 2001, Enger 2001, 2004, Conzett 2006, Nesset 2006). For example, Trosterud (2001) proposes as many as 43 different gender assignment rules, including three general rules, 28 semantic rules, nine morphological rules and three phonological rules. The abundance of rules proposed by Trosterud may be problematic in terms of learnability, since the rules cover relatively small groups of nouns, some of which are quite infrequent, especially in the input to young children. These rules also have a considerable number of exceptions. According to an experiment carried out by Gagliardi (2012),only three cues show strongpredictive power in Norwegian: Male human, female human, and final –e,a morphophonological cue for feminine.

The category gender is traditionally defined as agreement between the noun and other targets, e.g. determiners, adjectives or verbs (Hockett 1958, Corbett 1991). In Norwegian, there is in general very little agreement, e.g. no subject-verbconcord. This means that the expression of gender is to a large extent restricted to agreement internal to the DP. As we see in Table 1, this concerns agreement between the noun and the indefinite article and possessive determiners (a three-way gender distinction), and between the noun on the one hand and adjectives and the prenominal determiner in double definite forms on the other (generally a two-way gender distinction). In much of the literature on gender in Norwegian (e.g. Enger 2004, Lødrup 2011), the suffixed forms are not considered to express gender, but declension classes. The following example may illustrate the complex relationship between gender and declension class:Some neuter nouns end in -(e)rin the indefinite plural, e.g. eple-r‘apples’, which is different from the majority of neuter nouns which have no ending in this form, e.g. hus-Ø ‘houses’ in Table 1. These two nouns thus belong to different declension classes, but gender agreement is the same in both cases (et stort eple ‘a big apple’, et stort hus ‘a big house’). Nevertheless, the suffixed forms are often included in a discussion of gender in Norwegian, e.g. in Faarlund et al. (1997). In the present article we consider the suffixed forms in the child data and compare them to the forms that express gender as agreement.

3. Previous studies on gender acquisition

3.1The acquisition of transparent vs. opaque gender systems

Grammatical gender has been investigated extensively in both bilingual and monolingual acquisition ofmany languages, such as Italian, Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Czech, English, Greek and Welsh (Gvozdev 1961, Popova 1973, Henzl 1975, Levy 1983, Smoszyńska 1985, Mills 1986, Müller 1994, 2000, Serratrice 2000, Tsimpli 2004, Blom et al. 2008, Kupisch et al. 2002, Gathercole & Thomas 2005, Rodina 2008, Unsworth et al. 2011, Rodina & Westergaard 2012, forthcoming/2013. Generally, gender is acquired relatively early, typically by the age of three. However, the time of acquisition appears to be dependent on the morphophonological transparency of the target system,transparent cues facilitating early acquisition. For example, despite the many similarities between Slavic languages such as Polish, Russian and Czech, Polish has more transparent cues for gender assignment and agreement (Corbett 1991). It is thus not surprising that Polish childrenacquire a three-way gender distinction already at the age of two (Smoszyńska 1985). Russian and Czech children, on the other hand,have been observed to make agreement errors with certainnon-transparent noun classes until the age of three/four (Gvozdev 1961, Popova 1973, Henzl 1975, Rodina 2007, Rodina & Westergaard 2012, forthcoming/2013). A similar observation has been made for Romance languages such as French and Italian, based on monolingual and bilingual (French/German and Italian/German) acquisition (Kupisch et al. 2002). French children have been found to experience a delay in gender acquisition caused by the factthe French gender system exhibits fewer transparent morphophonological cues than Italian.

The presence of certain transparent morphophonological regularities in languages like German and Greek ensures that monolinguals acquire a three-way gender system earlier than children acquiring less complex systems, such as e.g. Dutch, which only makes a common vs. neuter distinction (Mills 1986, Tsimpli 2004, Blom et al. 2008). Tsimpli (2004) shows that Greek monolinguals acquire gender between the ages of three and four, while Dutch children make errors in the neuter until the age of six, since gender regularities are limited and have many exceptions (Blom et al. 2008). The differences in transparency of the gender systemsof Greek and Dutchhave also been shown to play a role in the acquisition of these languagesbybilingual Greek/English and Dutch/English children (Unsworth et al. 2011).The acquisition of non-transparent forms has been found to be particularly vulnerable in bilingual children, who generally have less exposure to the target gender system. For example, Gathercole & Thomas (2005) show that complex and opaque forms of the Welsh gender system are the most difficult to acquire for Welsh/English children, and they suggest that children with little exposure to Welsh at home and/or school may never converge on the target.

Otherrelevant observationshave been made with regard to the acquisition of gender marking on determiners. In German/French bilinguals, Müller (1994) found an overuse of masculine indefinite articles with feminine nouns in both languages between the ages of two and three. At the same time the children had no problems with gender marking on definite articles in either German or French. To explain this result, Müller suggests that the indefinite article initially hasreferential but no grammatical gender-marking function and should be analyzed as the numeral ein/une ‘one’. In a study on the acquisition of gender in Dutch by different groups of bilingual children, Cornips & Hulk (2008) observe that the children initially make no distinction between common and neuter gender in the definite form, and overuse the common gender article (i.e. de instead of het). Following Hawkins & Franceschina (2004), who observe a similar effect in young monolingual and bilingual children acquiring Dutch, they argue that the definite article de only has the feature definite, while the gender feature is unspecified. Finally, Italian monolinguals have been found to produce phonetically reduced forms of the indefinite article at an early stage (approximately the age of 2). An analysis of this by Bottari et al. (1993/94) suggeststhat the indefinite article is initially simply a placeholder with syntactic (positional) properties, and that the morphophonological properties of this element (such as gender) will develop later.

3.2 The acquisition of gender in Norwegian

Until recently there have been no studies focusing on the acquisition of grammatical gender in Norwegian.Some facts about the acquisition of the noun phrase in Scandinavian are reported in Plunkett & Strömquist (1992). Both Swedish and Danish have a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), and this has also been argued to be the case in the Oslo dialect of Norwegian (e.g. Lødrup 2011). Comparing some longitudinal data of one Swedish child, two Danish children, and one Norwegian child growing up in Oslo (data from Vanvik 1971),Plunkett & Strömquist (1992:526-529) find very few gender errors overall. However, the Norwegian child is making slightly more mistakes than the Swedish and Danish children, and they speculate that this is because the child is also exposed to Norwegian dialects with a three-gender system. Virtually all the gender errors found involve overgeneralization of common gender to neuter nouns, as shown by the following examples: In (1), both the definite suffix and the possessive are marked for common gender‚ while in (2) the suffix is correctly marked for neuter while the postnominal possessive again displays overgeneralization of common gender.

(1)eggen min

egg.def.comm.sgmy.comm.sg

‘my egg’ Target: egget mitt (n)

(2)badekaret min

bathtub.def.n.sg my.comm.sg

‘my bathtub’ Target: badekaret mitt (n)

Occasional examples of overgeneralization errors are also reported in Anderssen’s (2006) longitudinal study of the acquisition of compositional definiteness. The monolingual child in this study is found to occasionally overgeneralize the masculine to feminine and neuter nouns (e.g. en dame ‘a.m woman.f’ (Ina 1;10.4), en spøkels ‘a.m ghost.n’ (Ina 2;10.2)), especially in the indefinite form. No quantitative studies are made of these error types in previous literature.

More recently, two experimental studies (Gagliardi 2012, Rodina & Westergaard forthcoming/2013) have focused on gender acquisition in definite and indefinite DPs. Rodina & Westergaard find that masculine is frequently overgeneralized with feminine and neuter nouns in the indefinite and thatthe feminine is most problematic for Norwegian three-to-five-year-olds (mean age 4;4). They also report fewer gender errors with suffixed definite articles in the double definite forms. Similar findings arealso reported in Gagliardi (2012),who examines elicited production of older pre-school and school children (mean age 5;1 and 6;8). With regard to the children’s sensitivity to gender cues, Gagliardi observes that children have a strong bias to classify novel nouns as masculine.

4. Research questions and predictions

The previous studies reviewed in section 3.1 suggest that lack of transparency of a gender system may cause a delay in the acquisition process. As discussed in section 2, Norwegian has very few (if any) reliable gender regularities, and we therefore predict that the acquisition of gender will be delayed in relation to other languages where gender is more transparent. In light of previous acquisition findings from Norwegian as well as other languages, such as German and French (Müller 1994, Kupisch et al. 2002), we also expect that the children may have more problems with indefinite than with definite articles. Importantly, in order to investigate the issue of gender vs. declension class in Norwegian (cf. the discussion in section 2), we compare the children’s accuracy rates on suffixed forms with forms that express gender as agreement.

The study investigatestwo monolingual and two bilingual children growing up in Tromsø. According to De Houwer (2007), the acquisition of the majority language in bilinguals is typically unproblematic,and the bilingual childrenare thus not expected to experience more problems acquiring Norwegian than their monolingual peers. However, the children’s daily exposure to Norwegian did not start until the age of one, and they may therefore be considered early successive bilinguals, a category of learners where cross-linguistic influence is typically found (cf. Unsworth et al. 2011). Furthermore, the opaque nature of the gender system of Norwegian, which are problematic even for monolingual children, may cause even greater delays in bilingual learners.

5. The child data

The data are extracted from spontaneous production corpora of four children, two monolingual Norwegian children and two bilingual Norwegian-English children. The two monolingual children, Ina and Ole, were recorded from the age of approximately 1;9 to 3;0 (see Anderssen 2006, Westergaard 2009).

The bilingual data come from relatively restricted corpora of two girls, Emma and Sunniva. Emma’s data have been collected by Kristine Bentzen (Bentzen 2000), while Sunniva’s data have been provided by Merete Anderssen (not previously published). Emma’s data were collected between the ages of 2;7.10 and 2;10.9 and consist of seven one-hour recordings in Norwegian. She grew up in an English-speaking home with an American mother and a Norwegian father. She had no older siblings at the time of recording and English was used as the home language. Her daily exposure to Norwegian started in daycare at the age of one. Until then Emma was exposed to Norwegian outside the home, through the media, and from Norwegian-speaking friends and family.