His father’s daughter and her mother’s son: Gender attraction errors in child English

1. His father’s daughter and her mother’s son: Gender attraction errors in child English INTRODUCTION Lucia Pozzan1,2, DorotaRamlogan3, and Virginia Valian1,3 1CUNY Graduate Center, 2University of Pennsylvania, 3Hunter College – CUNY MATERIALS & METHODS Adult L2 learners of English have produce gender agreement errors on possessive pronouns, agreeing with the possessor rather than the possessee (Antón-Méndez (2010): Bob1sent a present to his1sister *Bob1 sent a present to her1sister RESEARCH QUESTIONS • Are gender agreement errors on pronouns a learner phenomenon  do children learning English as their L1 produce gender agreement errors? • Do errors occur equally in match and mismatch conditions? • Do errors occur equally with masculine and feminine nouns? • Are errors due to non-target (Romance-like) grammars or are they speech errors? Gender Errors: Match vs. Mismatch Female vs. Masculine Monolingual English-speaking children produce often incorrectly mark the gender of a possessive pronoun. • Gender errors are a learner phenomenon, rather than an L1-transfer error. Gender errors are significantly more frequent when the possessor and the possessee mismatch in gender attraction error. Gender errors occur to a similar extent in the two mismatch conditions: • Masculine gender is not used as default Initial evidence for speech error: • Children self-corrected an incorrect response: 20% self-corrections after an incorrect response, 0% after a correct response. • Same error has been documented in adult native speakers (5-6%) (Slevc et al. 2007) RESULTS CONCLUSIONS & FURTHER QUESTIONS Gender errors on possessive pronouns are a learner phenomenon. Incorrect grammars or speech errors? • If these errors are due to incorrect grammatical hypotheses, we expect them to surface in comprehension tasks. • Native adult input is not ambiguous, but possessive pronouns are low in token and type frequency, semantic scope and perceptual salience (Collins et al., 2009) • If these are speech errors, at what point of the production process do they occur? Antón-Méndez, I. (2010). Whose? L2-English speakers’ possessive pronoun gender errors. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-14. Collins, L., Trofimovich, P., White, J., Cardoso, W., & Horst, M. (2009). Some Input on the Easy/Difficult Grammar Question: An Empirical Study. Modern Language Journal, 93(3), 336-353. Slevc, L. R., Wardlow, L., & Ferreira, V. S. (2007). Pronoun Production: World or Word Knowledge? MIT Working papers in linguistics, (53), 191-203. Participants: • 14 Monolingual English-learning children • Mean age: 4;4 Task: Elicited Production Materials: 12 prompts Match Condition (4 prompts): Possessor – Possessee Mismatch Condition (4 prompts): Possessor – Possessee Mismatch Condition (4 prompts): Possessor– Possessee References