The Development of Lexical Knowledge: Toward a Model of the Acquisition of Lexical Gender in French
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: This paper attempts to answer a threefold question: from what kind of cues gender can reliably be assigned to French nouns? How the usage of these sublexical cues is acquired by chil-dren? What kind of computational models could account for the human data? We conducted an experiment with 73 1st and 2nd grade children to assess their knowledge about gender in-formation associated with suffixes using a gender decision task. Children had to assign gender to pseudo-words whose endings correspond to French suffixes (-ture,-ment…). Re-sults show that French children implicitly acquire this knowl-edge, even before learning to read. Simulation results fit ex-perimental data and show that the word ending represented by suffixes is one of the main cues to assign gender to French words.
Institution: Université Grenoble Alpes
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2152940703