Determiners and noun endings in French children’s gender attribution choices

Abstract

The present study examines the respective roles of determiners and noun endings in four to ten-year-old French children’s gender attribution choices. In the context of an elicited production task, participants were introduced with determiner–noun pairs where the gender form of the article and the probabilistic gender value of noun suffixes were discordant. Results showed that suffix-congruent choices were never above chance: they were far below chance in the case of feminine suffixes and either below or at chance in the case of masculine suffixes. Results are discussed with respect to a well-known phonological scenario for French gender acquisition and with respect to the masculine as default strategy recently put forth by Boloh and Ibernon (2010).