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Gender-marked determiners help Dutch learners' word recognition when gender information itself does not*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2010

MARIEKE VAN HEUGTEN  and
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
MARIEKE VAN HEUGTEN*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada
ELIZABETH K. JOHNSON
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Marieke van Heugten, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road N., Mississauga, ON, L5L 1C6, Canada. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use articles during sentence comprehension in a fashion comparable to similarly aged English learners. That is, Dutch learners' sentence processing was impaired when a nonsense (se) as opposed to real article (de, het) preceded target words, much like English learners' sentence processing is disrupted by the use of a nonsense article. At the same time, however, gender cues did not help Dutch learners recognize target nouns more efficiently, indicating that gender has yet to be acquired. Thus, although Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 have not mastered all aspects of their language's article system, they nonetheless use their partial knowledge of articles during speech processing.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 87 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank all the families that participated, Angela Khadar, Margret van Beuningen, Sara Bögels, Ellen Westrek and Monique Diks for their assistance with recruitment, preparing, running and coding this study, as well as Joost van de Weijer for the use of his corpus. This research was funded by an NWO Spinoza Grant entitled ‘Native and Non-native Listening’, awarded to Anne Cutler. Parts of this research were presented at the 12th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (Nijmegen, the Netherlands, August 2006) and at the 31st Boston University Conference on Language Development (Boston, MA, November 2006).

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