The role of a child’s gender in language acquisition

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to examine the relationship between the process of language acquisition and gender. It analyzes a longitudinal corpus of one girl, Rūta, covering the period from 1;7 to 2;6. The corpus consists of 35 hours of recordings. The recorded speech is transcribed according to the requirements of CHILDES (MacWhinney, Snow 1990). A special attention in the article is paid to testing the hypothesis which was supported by empirical evidence from other languages to the effect that the unmarked member, i.e. nouns of masculine gender, is acquired earlier than the marked member of the opposition (i.e. feminine nouns).

Keywords

• language development
• early stage
• longitudinal corpus
• nouns
• grammatical gender
• morphosyntactic properties
• inflectional patterns
• agreement
• Lithuanian