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Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
1
***DRAFT, PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE***
Infants’ Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies
Marieke van Heugten and Anne Christophe
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS / EHESS / CNRS)
Département d’Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research University
Author Note
Marieke van Heugten, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS /
EHESS / CNRS), Département d’Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research
University; Anne Christophe, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS /
EHESS / CNRS), Département d’Études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure – PSL Research
University.
This work was supported by a Fyssen postdoctoral grant, as well as grants from the
French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-2010-BLAN-1901, ANR-13-APPR-0012,
ANR-10-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0087), the Fondation de France, and the Région
Ile-de-France. We thank all children and their families for their participation.
Correspondence should be addressed to Marieke van Heugten, Department of
Psychology, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260, United
States. E-mail: mariekev@buffalo.edu.
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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Abstract
To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within
sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word
categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants’ early
sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where
the article form is dictated by the noun’s gender). This study therefore examines whether French-
learning 18-month-olds track such relationships. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, infants
were presented with article-noun sequences in which the gender-marked article either matched
(e.g., laFEM poussetteFEM ‘the stroller’) or mismatched (e.g., leMASC poussetteFEM) the gender of
the noun. A clear preference for correct over incorrect co-occurrences was observed, suggesting
that by 18 months of age, children’s storage and access of words is sufficiently sophisticated to
include the means to track subcategorical dependencies. This early sensitivity to gender
information may be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access during online language
processing.
Keywords: grammatical gender, determiners, morphosyntax, language development
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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Infants’ Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies
Within their first few years of life, children rapidly and without much instruction acquire
their native language. By the time they reach their first birthday, infants typically start
pronouncing their first words and their productive vocabulary quickly expands to an approximate
average of 300 words around age two (Dale & Fenson, 1996). Over time, toddlers start to
combine words into short phrases (e.g., Brown, 1973) and by the preschool period, most children
speak in full sentences. The building blocks for such language skills are, however, in place long
before evidence for its productive use is observed. As early as by six months of age, for instance,
children map frequently occurring words in their language input onto visual representations of
these items (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012; Tincoff & Jusczyk, 2012) and in the ensuing months,
infants start tuning into the formal relationships among linguistic elements as a function of the
arrangement of words and phrases within an utterance.
Relationships between words within an utterance are often conveyed by means of
function morphemes, such as determiners (e.g., the) or pronouns (e.g., she). Although these
frequently occurring, closed-class words tend to be omitted from children’s early productions,
and have traditionally been thought to be overlooked until long after children start talking
(Brown, 1973), more recent work testing the perception of these items has revealed that children
do process them. Towards the end of the first year of life, for example, infants encode and
recognize the sound forms of function words (e.g., Shafer, Shucard, Shucard, & Gerken, 1998;
Shi, Cutler, Werker, & Cruickshank, 2006) and use this knowledge to segment phrases into its
individual components (Hallé, Durand, & de Boysson-Bardies, 2008; Shi et al., 2006; Shi &
Lepage, 2008). Given that functors tend to be indicative of the word class of subsequent
linguistic material (e.g., the is more likely to be followed by nouns such as ball than by verbs
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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such as walked; Mintz, 2003; Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998), knowledge of function words
can furthermore constrain word candidates to the items of a specific syntactic category. Indeed,
by 18 months of age, infants readily exploit function words both to deduce the word class of
novel words (Höhle, Weissenborn, Kiefer, Schulz, & Schmitz, 2004; Shi & Melançon, 2010) and
to facilitate the recognition of familiar words (Cauvet et al., 2014; Gerken & McIntosh, 1993;
Kedar, Casasola, & Lust, 2006; Van Heugten & Johnson, 2011; Zangl & Fernald, 2007).
Relationships between words do not merely exist between major word classes, but can
also involve more subtle subcategories. In French, for instance, the form of singular articles
depends on the gender of the associated noun (e.g., leMASC doudouMASC ‘the security blanket’ but
laFEM poussetteFEM ‘the stroller’). Although the dependency between article form and noun
gender is largely independent of the semantics of the word,1 French learners nonetheless exploit
this co-occurrence pattern during linguistic processing by 25 months of age (Van Heugten & Shi,
2009; also see Johnson, 2005; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007 for similar results with slightly
older Dutch- and Spanish-learners). However, not much is known regarding the developmental
trajectory of this sensitivity to grammatical gender. In particular, it is currently unclear whether
children start acquiring this article-noun dependency early on in life or whether it is only learned
around their second birthday, though there is reason to suspect that tracking gender co-
occurrences can be challenging prior to age two. Specifically, artificial language work suggests
that English-learning 17-month-olds gain sensitivity to an unfamiliar (though relatively simple)
gender system only when multiple correlated phonological cues are available (Gerken, Wilson,
& Lewis, 2005). In addition, acquiring the abstract grammatical categories of new words has
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1French does have some semantically transparent words, mostly nouns referring to human
entities (e.g., laFEM filleFEM ‘the girl’ vs. leMASC garconMASC ‘the boy’), but these are considered
the exception (Corbett, 1991).
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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been shown to be hard for young children when task demands are relatively high (Cyr & Shi,
2013). In that study, children were taught four novel word forms preceded by a gender-marked
indefinite article as the sole cue denoting its gender (e.g., unMASC ravoleMASC; ‘a
<pseudoword>’). At test, children were presented with the same pseudowords preceded either by
the correct or by the incorrect definite article (e.g., correct: leMASC ravoleMASC ‘the
<pseudoword>’; incorrect: laFEM ravoleMASC ‘the <pseudoword>’). Using this design, children
were found to differentiate between the two types of test trials only by 30 months of age,
although 20-month-olds were subsequently shown to succeed when task demands were reduced.
What does this mean for learning gender dependencies in the case of naturalistic
language input? On the one hand, children’s language input lacks the simplicity associated with
laboratory experiments and learning gender from everyday input may be relatively hard
compared to laboratory tasks. On the other hand, experiments typically last only a few minutes
(compared to a more extensive time span available for learning dependencies in natural
languages), potentially making it easier to learn novel dependencies from the input. To
differentiate between these two possibilities, this study examines whether French-learning
children track and store the subcategorical gender information of familiar words before their
second birthday. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, 18-month-olds were presented with lists
of grammatical and ungrammatical noun phrases (NPs), the grammatical lists containing correct-
gender definite articles (e.g., leMASC doudouMASC ‘the security blanket’; laFEM poussetteFEM ‘the
stroller’) and the ungrammatical lists containing incorrect-gender definite articles (e.g., laFEM
doudouMASC ‘the security blanket’; leMASC poussetteFEM ‘the stroller’). Following previous work
pitting grammatical and ungrammatical utterances using similar procedures (e.g., Santelmann &
Jusczyk, 1998; Van Heugten & Johnson, 2010; Van Heugten & Shi, 2010), a preference for the
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
6
correct over the incorrect NPs will be taken to indicate children’s sensitivity to grammatical
gender cues.
Method
Participants
A total of 24 typically developing monolingual French-learning 18-month-olds from the
Paris area participated in this study (mean age: 18 months, 7 days; age range: 17 months, 21 days
-19 months, 9 days; 12 girls). None of these children were known to have any language or
hearing problem. An additional three infants were tested, but excluded from the analyses due to
extreme fussiness. Participating children received a diploma as a token of appreciation.
Materials
Twelve nouns (six monosyllabic and six bisyllabic), generally known by 18-month-olds,
were used in this study. Half of these nouns were masculine and the other half feminine
(masculine: chat ‘cat’, chien ‘dog’, pain ‘bread’, bébé ‘baby’, biberon ‘bottle’, doudou ‘security
blanket’; feminine: bouche ‘mouth’, couche ‘diaper’, main ‘hand’, cuillère ‘spoon’, compote
‘stewed fruit’, poussette ‘stroller’). A female native speaker of French recorded the materials. To
avoid recording ungrammatical utterances (potentially resulting in unnatural tokens), the
materials were cross-spliced. For each NP token used in the study, three versions were recorded.
One version contained the noun preceded by the correct definite article (e.g., la poussette ‘the
stroller’). From this version, the noun was spliced. In the other two versions, the noun was
replaced by a word starting with the same consonant-vowel sequence. One of these nouns was
masculine and the other one feminine. Both were preceded by the correct definite article (e.g., le
poulet ‘the chicken’; la poupée ‘the doll’). From these two tokens, the article was selected. In
order to prevent mismatches in co-articulation between the article vowel and noun onset, articles
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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and nouns were spliced immediately following the noun onset consonant, just before the first
vowel of the noun. The combination of the articles with the noun resulted in two NPs, one
containing the correct definite article (e.g., la poussette) and one containing the incorrect definite
article (e.g., le poussette), that were similar in duration and intonation (average correct NP
length: 855 ms; average incorrect NP length: 865 ms).
Eight lists were created, four of which contained the correct NPs and four of which
contained incorrect NPs. Lists contained two unique tokens of each of the twelve NPs. These
NPs were ordered differently across each of the four correct and incorrect lists, but the order was
identical across these two conditions. Interstimulus pauses were approximately 750 ms long. All
lists lasted 38.3 s.
In addition to these auditory materials, which formed the core of the experiment, two
movies were used. One movie, a silent clip from the Flurry screensaver featuring colorful swirls,
was used to capture the children’s looks toward the screen during stimulus presentation. The
other movie, a red flashing light accompanied by a cartoon boing, was used as an attention getter
during the intertrial period.
Procedure
Infants were individually tested for their spontaneous listening preferences using the
Visual Fixation Procedure. During test, they sat on the parent’s lap in front of a TV screen in a
sound-attenuated booth. At the front of the booth, next to the TV, two loudspeakers were
positioned at the child’s ear level. Stimuli were presented using the Lincoln Infant Lab Package
1.0 software package (Meints & Woodford, 2008). The procedure started by displaying the
attention getter on the screen. Once the child oriented towards the screen, the experimenter,
monitoring the child’s looking behavior through a videocamera, initiated the first trial. During
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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each trial, the experimenter pushed a button when the child oriented towards the screen. When
the child looked away, the experimenter released the button. If the child reoriented towards the
screen within two seconds, the trial continued to play, but the time looked away was subtracted
from the orientation time. Trials lasted until the child looked away for more than two seconds or
until the maximum list length was reached. The experiment finished when the child had been
presented with all eight lists. All children listened to the same lists, though the order in which
these lists appeared was randomized separately for each child.
Results
Parental reports confirmed that children generally understood most of the words used in
the study (mean number of words comprehended: 10.88 out of 12; range: 6-12). Children
oriented towards the screen for an average of 21.76 s in Correct trials and for an average of 17.59
s in Incorrect trials (see Figure 1), with 18 out of 24 children listening longer to Correct than to
Incorrect trials. A 2-tailed paired samples t-test revealed that these two values differ significantly
from each other (4.17 s; SEM = 1.52 s; t(23) = 2.747; p = 0.011; d = .581). Neither the child’s
age nor the number of test words parents reported their child to know correlated with this
difference score. Thus, by 18 months of age, infants display a robust preference for correctly
used over incorrectly used definite articles, indicating that they track the co-occurrence between
article and noun during language processing.
Discussion
This study shows that French-learning 18-month-olds track (and store) the subtle co-
occurrence patterns between article form and noun gender. By presenting infants with correct
and incorrect article-noun sequences, we identified a listening preference for correct over
incorrect phrases, suggesting that children are sensitive to gender dependencies in the months
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
9
prior to their second birthday. Children’s daily language input thus provides them with the
information necessary to learn subcategorical relationships early in life.
How could this early sensitivity to gender cues help children process spoken language?
Although the current study does not explicitly test whether the NPs were segmented into its
individual components, infants’ early sensitivity to the form and usage of function words (Hallé
et al., 2008; Shi et al., 2006; Shi & Lepage, 2008) makes it unlikely that 18-month-olds consider
article-noun sequences to be unanalyzed single words (e.g., lapoussette). Instead, the recognition
of an article (e.g., la) will allow children to infer the presence of a noun (Cauvet et al., 2014;
Höhle et al., 2004; Shi & Melançon, 2010), and its associated gender cues may subsequently
prevent (or eliminate) the activation of candidates that do not belong to the same subcategorical
gender category. For example, upon hearing la pou, children may continue to consider both
feminine-gender poussette ‘stroller’ and poupée ‘doll’ as potential nouns, but masculine-gender
poulet ‘chicken’ should no longer be an option (cf. Johnson, 2005; Lew-Williams & Fernald,
2007; Van Heugten & Shi, 2009 for similar patterns with older children). Note that the current
study does not test whether the acquired gender knowledge is grammatical (i.e. masculine nouns
should be preceded by masculine articles; feminine nouns should be preceded by feminine
articles) or distributional (i.e. doudou ‘security blanket’ should be preceded by le; poussette
‘stroller’ should be preceded by la; though see, Cyr & Shi, 2013 for evidence for grammatical
abstraction). It may thus be either the surface form of the articles or their associated gender cues
that could drive the potential advantage for online language processing. Future work could tease
apart these two possibilities.
In sum, this study reveals that infants as young as 18 months track the co-occurrence
patterns between articles and nouns in their daily language input in a robust fashion and use this
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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information during speech perception. This early sensitivity to such a subtle subcategorical cue
could be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access and underlines the tremendous
sophistication of early syntactic processing.
Running head: INFANT GENDER ACQUISITION
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Figure 1. Mean orientation times in seconds (error bars indicate the standard error of the mean
difference score) to correct and incorrect NPs.
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Orientation time (in s)
Correct NPs
Incorrect NPs
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