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Gender-marked determiners help Dutch learners' word recognition when gender information itself does not
Marieke van Heugten1, Elizabeth K Johnson
1Department of Psychology,University of Toronto-Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road N., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. marieke.vanheugten@utoronto.ca
Journal of Child Language
|January 26, 2010
Summary
Dutch-learning children use articles in sentence comprehension similarly to English learners. However, they have not yet acquired gender cues for noun recognition, indicating partial article system development.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- English uses one definite article, while Dutch has two gender-marked definite articles ('de', 'het').
- This difference raises questions about potential delays in determiner system acquisition for Dutch-learning children compared to English learners.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether the presence of multiple definite article forms in Dutch impacts the developmental trajectory of article usage in sentence comprehension.
- To compare the article processing abilities of Dutch-learning children with those of English-learning children.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the Preferential Looking Procedure to assess sentence comprehension in young children.
- Tested Dutch-learning children aged 1 year 7 months to 2 years 0 months.
- Compared their performance with similarly aged English learners.
Main Results:
- Dutch-learning children demonstrated comparable article usage in sentence comprehension to English learners.
- Sentence processing for Dutch learners was impaired by nonsense articles ('se') versus real articles ('de', 'het'), mirroring effects seen in English learners.
- Gender cues did not enhance target noun recognition in Dutch learners, suggesting incomplete acquisition of gender marking.
Conclusions:
- Dutch-learning children aged 1;7 to 2;0 utilize their developing knowledge of articles during speech processing.
- Despite not mastering the full article system, including gender cues, their article use is comparable to English learners at this stage.
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