Assignment of Grammatical Gender in Heritage Greek

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Heritage speakers may exhibit unique linguistic patterns compared to monolinguals.
• Understanding grammatical gender acquisition is key to language development research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate grammatical gender acquisition in Heritage Greek speakers.
• To analyze the influence of morphological, semantic, and phonological cues on gender assignment.
• To compare heritage speakers' performance with monolingual Greek speakers.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a determiner elicitation task (Varlokosta, 2005).
• Analyzed real and novel nouns using Ralli's (1994) inflectional classes and prototypicality categories (Anastasiadi-Symeonidi & Cheila-Markopoulou, 2003).
• Compared data from children (6-8) and adolescents (15-18) with monolingual controls.

Main Results:

• Heritage speakers demonstrated age-related differences in gender assignment.
• A formal phonological rule was identified as a significant factor in heritage speakers' gender assignment.
• This phonological rule differed from initial hypotheses.

Conclusions:

• Grammatical gender acquisition in Heritage Greek is influenced by factors beyond semantic and morphological cues.
• Phonological rules play a crucial role in the gender assignment of heritage speakers.
• Age and linguistic background interact in shaping language acquisition in bilingual environments.