His fathers daughter and her mothers son Gender

His father’s daughter and her mother’s son: Gender attraction errors in child English Lucia Pozzan 1, 2, Dorota Ramlogan 3, and Virginia Valian 1, 3 1 CUNY INTRODUCTION Graduate Center, 2 University of Pennsylvania, 3 Hunter College – CUNY • Adult L 2 learners of English have • Participants: produce gender agreement • 14 Monolingual Englisherrors on possessive pronouns, learning children agreeing with the possessor • Mean age: 4; 4 rather than the possessee (Antón. Méndez (2010): Bob 1 sent a present to his 1 sister • Task: Elicited Production *Bob 1 sent a present to her 1 sister RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1. Are gender agreement errors on pronouns a learner phenomenon do children learning English as their L 1 produce gender agreement errors? 2. Do errors occur equally in match and mismatch conditions? 3. Do errors occur equally with masculine and feminine nouns? 4. Are errors due to non-target (Romance-like) grammars or are they speech errors? RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2011 www. Poster. Presentations. com RESULTS MATERIALS & METHODS Gender Errors: Match vs. Mismatch Female vs. Masculine • Materials: 12 prompts • Match Condition (4 prompts): Possessor – Possessee • Mismatch Condition (4 prompts): Possessor – Possessee 1. Monolingual English-speaking children produce often incorrectly mark the gender of a possessive pronoun. • Gender errors are a learner phenomenon, rather than an L 1 -transfer error. 2. Gender errors are significantly more frequent when the possessor and the possessee mismatch in gender attraction error. 3. Gender errors occur to a similar extent in the two mismatch conditions: • Masculine gender is not used as default 4. Initial evidence for speech error: • Children self-corrected an incorrect response: 20% self-corrections after an incorrect response, 0% after a correct response. • Same error has been documented in adult native speakers (5 -6%) (Slevc et al. 2007) CONCLUSIONS & FURTHER QUESTIONS • Gender errors on possessive pronouns are a learner phenomenon. • Incorrect grammars or speech errors? • If these errors are due to incorrect grammatical hypotheses, we expect them to surface in comprehension tasks. • Native adult input is not ambiguous, but possessive pronouns are low in token and type frequency, semantic scope and perceptual salience (Collins et al. , 2009) • If these are speech errors, at what point of the production process do they occur? References Antón-Méndez, I. (2010). Whose? L 2 -English speakers’ possessive pronoun gender errors. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 -14. Collins, L. , Trofimovich, P. , White, J. , Cardoso, W. , & Horst, M. (2009). Some Input on the Easy/Difficult Grammar Question: An Empirical Study. Modern Language Journal, 93(3), 336 -353. Slevc, L. R. , Wardlow, L. , & Ferreira, V. S. (2007). Pronoun Production: World or Word Knowledge? MIT Working papers in linguistics, (53), 191203.