Grammatical Gender

Grammatical gender is a system found in many languages. It assigns all nouns (including inanimate ones) to noun classes, marking neighboring words for agreement. Languages differ in the number of gender classes and in the range of elements that agree in gender with the noun. In Hebrew, for example, verbs and adjectives are marked for gender, while in Spanish and French, articles also have to agree in gender with the nouns they precede (e.g., la pelota [the—feminine, ball—feminine] versus el vaso [the—masculine, glass—masculine]). Gender assignment affects agreement between the noun and all the elements that are syntactically related to it, resulting in agreement patterns that can be local (between articles and nouns) or nonlocal (between a noun and a pronoun that refers to it). In all languages that mark gender, knowing a noun's gender is essential for correct sentence construction.

Grammatical gender is different from natural gender. Natural gender is the distinction (found in all languages) between masculine and feminine entities (e.g., boy versus girl). Grammatical gender is a linguistic category: It is assigned to all nouns (including inanimate ones) and can have more than two classes. Unlike natural gender, the assignment of grammatical gender is largely arbitrary and differs across languages (e.g., table is feminine in Spanish but masculine in Hebrew). Languages differ in the number of gender classes they have (e.g., two in Spanish, three in German, and 23 in some Bantu languages) and in the reliability and transparency of the cues to class membership. To master this arbitrary system, children need to learn each noun's gender and how it affects agreement patterns with other elements in the sentence. The acquisition of grammatical gender offers insight into the way children learn the regularities and exceptions of the language they are exposed to.

Languages differ with respect to the gender cues they provide learners. In many languages, there are phonological cues to class membership: Nouns belonging to the same class have similar form. In Spanish, for instance, most nouns ending in -o are masculine. In other languages, there are semantic cues to class membership, with nouns of the same class [Page 260]having similar meaning (only humans or only plants). Phonological and semantic cues are probabilistic and cannot always correctly predict a noun's gender; for example, nouns can be phonologically marked as one gender but belong to another. Distributional information is another cue to gender assignment: Agreement patterns reveal if a noun is masculine or feminine (e.g., in Spanish, the article is a perfect predictor of the noun's gender). While generally more reliable, distributional cues can also be inconsistent. In Hebrew, for instance, plural agreement may indicate one gender, while adjective agreement will indicate another (e.g., efronot gdolim [pencils—feminine, big—masculine]). The reliability and availability of cues to gender assignment differ across languages, a difference that affects how these systems are acquired.

Children master grammatical gender relatively early and make few errors in spontaneous speech. By the time they start producing articles (around age 2), children mostly produce the correct article for a given noun. Correct agreement marking on verbs and adjectives is also learned early relative to other morphological domains.

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