THE ACQUISITION OF GENDER AND DECLENSION CLASS IN A NON-

TRANSPARENT SYSTEM: MONOLINGUALS AND BILINGUALS

Yulia Rodina & Marit Westergaard

Abstract. This article presents a corpus study of the acquisition of grammatical

gender in Norwegian in two monolingual and two bilingual Norwegian-English

children. Gender in Norwegian is expressed as agreement between the noun and

other targets such as determiners and adjectives, while definiteness and plurality

are expressed as suffixes on the noun itself, i.e. as part of the declension.

Furthermore, the gender system is characterized by relatively opaque gender

assignment, suggesting that there may be a delay in the acquisition process

compared to languages with more transparent systems. Our results show that, while

the acquisition of suffixed forms is unproblematic, the children experience

considerable problems with gender agreement. Moreover, there is generally no

qualitative difference between the monolingual and bilingual children. These

findings are discussed in relation to a number of issues: gender vs. declension class,

the role of frequency, knowledge of the concept of gender, and monolingual vs.

bilingual acquisition.

1. Introduction

The goal of this paper is to study the acquisition of the gender system in Norwegian

at an early stage, i.e. before the age of three. We investigate the development of

grammatical gender in corpus data from two monolingual and two bilingual

Norwegian-English children, mainly focusing on two aspects of the gender system.

First, gender in Norwegian is expressed as agreement between a noun and other

targets (e.g. determiners and adjectives) and as declensional suffixes expressing

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definiteness and plurality in addition to gender. For example, while the indefinite

article is a free morpheme, e.g. ei bok ‘a book’, the definite article is a suffix, e.g. boka

‘the book’. There is also a double definite form (required when the noun is

modified), displaying both a prenominal determiner and a suffix, e.g. den nye boka

‘the new book’. Second, grammatical gender in Norwegian is relatively opaque, in

the sense that the gender of most nouns cannot be inferred from the shape of the

noun itself and has to be learned for individual lexical items. This means that input

frequency is expected to play an important role in the acquisition process.

Compared to what has been found in studies of the acquisition of languages with

more transparent gender systems such as Italian or Russian (Kupisch et al. 2002,

Gvozdev 1961), where gender agreement is often found to be in place from early on,

the acquisition of target-consistent gender agreement may take somewhat longer in

Norwegian. This should especially be the case in bilingual situations, since bilingual

children typically have comparatively less input in Norwegian than monolingual

children. Children who are learning English simultaneously with Norwegian may

also be slower in acquiring the concept of grammatical gender, since this is not

present on nouns in English at all.

Our main findings show that the acquisition of gender expressed on suffixes (the

definite singular article and the definite and indefinite plural forms) is relatively

unproblematic for the children, whether they are monolingual or bilingual. In

comparison, the production of gender agreement, especially the indefinite article,

shows a considerable delay, as some of the children are found to massively

overgeneralize the masculine. In the double definite forms, we also find several

cases of omission in the child data. Due to great individual variation across the four

children, we cannot distinguish any clear qualitative differences between the

monolinguals and the bilinguals.

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2. The gender system of Norwegian (Tromsø dialect)

Norwegian generally has a three-gender system, distinguishing between masculine,

feminine and neuter.1 According to Trosterud (2001), masculine nouns constitute

52%, feminine nouns 32%, and neuter nouns only 16% of all nouns in the Nynorsk

Dictionary (based on a total of 31,500 nouns). While we have not studied this

specifically, this distribution should generally correspond to the situation in the

dialect that the children in this study are exposed to (Tromsø).

As shown in Table 1, the Tromsø dialect makes a three-way gender distinction.

Gender is expressed on indefinite and definite articles, possessive and

demonstrative determiners, as well as on some adjectives. Indefinite articles are

free morphemes (e.g. en hest ‘a horse’) while definite articles are bound (e.g. hesten

‘horse-the’). In addition there are double definite forms, where a free prenominal

determiner is combined with a bound definite article, e.g. den hesten, ‘that horse-

the’. Double definiteness is required when the noun is demonstrative or modified by

an adjective. Adjectives only express gender in the indefinite singular, with a

distinction between masculine and feminine on the one hand (i.e. common gender)

and neuter on the other (e.g. fin ‘nice.M/F vs. fint ‘nice.N’). Only one exceptional

adjective, liten/lita/lite ‘little/small’, distinguishes between all three genders.

1 There is some dialectal variation, and certain dialects only exhibit two genders, common and neuter (cf. e.g. Lødrup 2011).

3

Table 1. The gender system of the Tromsø dialect2

Gender Masculine Feminine Neuter

SG Indefinite en hest a horse ei seng a bed et hus a house

Definite hesten horse-the senga bed-the huset house-the

Double

Definite

den hesten

that horse-the

den senga

that bed-the

det huset

that house-the

Adjective en fin hest

a nice horse

ei fin seng

a nice bed

et fint hus

a nice house

en liten hest

a small horse

ei lita seng

a small bed

et lite hus

a small house

Possessive min hest/hesten min

my horse

mi seng/senga mi

my bed

mitt hus/huset mitt

my house

PL Indefinite hesta

horses

senge

beds

hus

houses

Definite hestan

horses-the

sengen

beds-the

husan

houses-the

Adjective fine hesta

nice horses

fine senge

nice beds

fine hus

nice houses

Possessive mine hesta/

hestan mine

my horses

mine senge/

sengen mine

my beds

mine hus/

husan mine

my houses

There is one group of feminine nouns in the Tromsø dialect that behave differently

from the noun presented in Table 1. These nouns end in -a and are often referred to

as bare definites (cf. e.g. Anderssen 2006), as they appear in the same form in the

indefinite and definite singular, e.g. ei jenta – jenta ‘a girl – the girl’. In many other

dialects of Norwegian, as well as in the written standards Bokmål and Nynorsk, these

nouns end in –e, and there is thus alternation between the indefinite and definite

2 The final consonant in the suffix –et in the neuter definite is silent, which means that for neuter nouns ending in –e, there is no distinction between the indefinite and the definite form (e.g. et hode - hodet ‘a head - the head’).

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forms, ei jente – jenta. As discussed in Anderssen (2006:207), some speakers of the

Tromsø dialect alternate between the indefinite forms ei jente/ei jenta. This may

also be true for the children in our study and hence cause some uncertainty in our

analysis of the data. We return to this in section 6.

Gender assignment in Norwegian has traditionally been viewed as arbitrary,

since gender is not manifested on the phonological form of the noun itself. It has

also been argued that a large number of idiosyncratic assignment rules cover small

classes of nouns (Trosterud 2001, Enger 2001, 2004, Conzett 2006, Nesset 2006).

For example, Trosterud (2001) proposes as many as 43 different gender assignment

rules, including three general rules, 28 semantic rules, nine morphological rules and

three phonological rules. The abundance of rules proposed by Trosterud may be

problematic in terms of learnability, since the rules cover relatively small groups of

nouns, some of which are quite infrequent, especially in the input to young children.

These rules also have a considerable number of exceptions. According to an

experiment carried out by Gagliardi (2012), only three cues show strong predictive

power in Norwegian: Male human, female human, and final –e, a

morphophonological cue for feminine.

The category gender is traditionally defined as agreement between the noun and

other targets, e.g. determiners, adjectives or verbs (Hockett 1958, Corbett 1991). In

Norwegian, there is in general very little agreement, e.g. no subject-verb concord.

This means that the expression of gender is to a large extent restricted to agreement

internal to the DP. As we see in Table 1, this concerns agreement between the noun

and the indefinite article and possessive determiners (a three-way gender

distinction), and between the noun on the one hand and adjectives and the

prenominal determiner in double definite forms on the other (generally a two-way

gender distinction). In much of the literature on gender in Norwegian (e.g. Enger

2004, Lødrup 2011), the suffixed forms are not considered to express gender, but

declension classes. The following example may illustrate the complex relationship

between gender and declension class: Some neuter nouns end in -(e)r in the

indefinite plural, e.g. eple-r ‘apples’, which is different from the majority of neuter

nouns which have no ending in this form, e.g. hus-Ø ‘houses’ in Table 1. These two

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nouns thus belong to different declension classes, but gender agreement is the same

in both cases (et stort eple ‘a big apple’, et stort hus ‘a big house’). Nevertheless, the

suffixed forms are often included in a discussion of gender in Norwegian, e.g. in

Faarlund et al. (1997). In the present article we consider the suffixed forms in the

child data and compare them to the forms that express gender as agreement.

3. Previous studies on gender acquisition

3.1 The acquisition of transparent vs. opaque gender systems

Grammatical gender has been investigated extensively in both bilingual and

monolingual acquisition of many languages, such as Italian, Spanish, German,

French, Dutch, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Czech, English, Greek and Welsh (Gvozdev

1961, Popova 1973, Henzl 1975, Levy 1983, Smoszyńska 1985, Mills 1986, Müller

1994, 2000, Serratrice 2000, Tsimpli 2004, Blom et al. 2008, Kupisch et al. 2002,

Gathercole & Thomas 2005, Rodina 2008, Unsworth et al. 2011, Rodina &

Westergaard 2012, forthcoming/2013. Generally, gender is acquired relatively

early, typically by the age of three. However, the time of acquisition appears to be

dependent on the morphophonological transparency of the target system,

transparent cues facilitating early acquisition. For example, despite the many

similarities between Slavic languages such as Polish, Russian and Czech, Polish has

more transparent cues for gender assignment and agreement (Corbett 1991). It is

thus not surprising that Polish children acquire a three-way gender distinction

already at the age of two (Smoszyńska 1985). Russian and Czech children, on the

other hand, have been observed to make agreement errors with certain non-

transparent noun classes until the age of three/four (Gvozdev 1961, Popova 1973,

Henzl 1975, Rodina 2007, Rodina & Westergaard 2012, forthcoming/2013). A

similar observation has been made for Romance languages such as French and

Italian, based on monolingual and bilingual (French/German and Italian/German)

acquisition (Kupisch et al. 2002). French children have been found to experience a

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delay in gender acquisition caused by the fact the French gender system exhibits

fewer transparent morphophonological cues than Italian.

The presence of certain transparent morphophonological regularities in

languages like German and Greek ensures that monolinguals acquire a three-way

gender system earlier than children acquiring less complex systems, such as e.g.

Dutch, which only makes a common vs. neuter distinction (Mills 1986, Tsimpli 2004,

Blom et al. 2008). Tsimpli (2004) shows that Greek monolinguals acquire gender

between the ages of three and four, while Dutch children make errors in the neuter

until the age of six, since gender regularities are limited and have many exceptions

(Blom et al. 2008). The differences in transparency of the gender systems of Greek

and Dutch have also been shown to play a role in the acquisition of these languages

by bilingual Greek/English and Dutch/English children (Unsworth et al. 2011). The

acquisition of non-transparent forms has been found to be particularly vulnerable in

bilingual children, who generally have less exposure to the target gender system.

For example, Gathercole & Thomas (2005) show that complex and opaque forms of

the Welsh gender system are the most difficult to acquire for Welsh/English

children, and they suggest that children with little exposure to Welsh at home

and/or school may never converge on the target.

Other relevant observations have been made with regard to the acquisition of

gender marking on determiners. In German/French bilinguals, Müller (1994) found

an overuse of masculine indefinite articles with feminine nouns in both languages

between the ages of two and three. At the same time the children had no problems

with gender marking on definite articles in either German or French. To explain this

result, Müller suggests that the indefinite article initially has referential but no

grammatical gender-marking function and should be analyzed as the numeral

ein/une ‘one’. In a study on the acquisition of gender in Dutch by different groups of

bilingual children, Cornips & Hulk (2008) observe that the children initially make no

distinction between common and neuter gender in the definite form, and overuse

the common gender article (i.e. de instead of het). Following Hawkins &

Franceschina (2004), who observe a similar effect in young monolingual and

bilingual children acquiring Dutch, they argue that the definite article de only has

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the feature definite, while the gender feature is unspecified. Finally, Italian

monolinguals have been found to produce phonetically reduced forms of the

indefinite article at an early stage (approximately the age of 2). An analysis of this by

Bottari et al. (1993/94) suggests that the indefinite article is initially simply a

placeholder with syntactic (positional) properties, and that the morphophonological

properties of this element (such as gender) will develop later.

3.2 The acquisition of gender in Norwegian

Until recently there have been no studies focusing on the acquisition of grammatical

gender in Norwegian. Some facts about the acquisition of the noun phrase in

Scandinavian are reported in Plunkett & Strömquist (1992). Both Swedish and

Danish have a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), and this has also

been argued to be the case in the Oslo dialect of Norwegian (e.g. Lødrup 2011).

Comparing some longitudinal data of one Swedish child, two Danish children, and

one Norwegian child growing up in Oslo (data from Vanvik 1971), Plunkett &

Strömquist (1992:526-529) find very few gender errors overall. However, the

Norwegian child is making slightly more mistakes than the Swedish and Danish

children, and they speculate that this is because the child is also exposed to

Norwegian dialects with a three-gender system. Virtually all the gender errors

found involve overgeneralization of common gender to neuter nouns, as shown by

the following examples: In (1), both the definite suffix and the possessive are

marked for common gender‚ while in (2) the suffix is correctly marked for neuter

while the postnominal possessive again displays overgeneralization of common

gender.

(1) eggen min

egg.DEF.COMM.SG my.COMM.SG

‘my egg’ Target: egget mitt (N)

(2) badekaret min

bathtub.DEF.N.SG my.COMM.SG

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‘my bathtub’ Target: badekaret mitt (N)

Occasional examples of overgeneralization errors are also reported in Anderssen’s

(2006) longitudinal study of the acquisition of compositional definiteness. The

monolingual child in this study is found to occasionally overgeneralize the

masculine to feminine and neuter nouns (e.g. en dame ‘a.M woman.F’ (Ina 1;10.4), en

spøkels ‘a.M ghost.N’ (Ina 2;10.2)), especially in the indefinite form. No quantitative

studies are made of these error types in previous literature.

More recently, two experimental studies (Gagliardi 2012, Rodina & Westergaard

forthcoming/2013) have focused on gender acquisition in definite and indefinite

DPs. Rodina & Westergaard find that masculine is frequently overgeneralized with

feminine and neuter nouns in the indefinite and that the feminine is most

problematic for Norwegian three-to-five-year-olds (mean age 4;4). They also report

fewer gender errors with suffixed definite articles in the double definite forms.

Similar findings are also reported in Gagliardi (2012), who examines elicited

production of older pre-school and school children (mean age 5;1 and 6;8). With

regard to the children’s sensitivity to gender cues, Gagliardi observes that children

have a strong bias to classify novel nouns as masculine.

4. Research questions and predictions

The previous studies reviewed in section 3.1 suggest that lack of transparency of a

gender system may cause a delay in the acquisition process. As discussed in section

2, Norwegian has very few (if any) reliable gender regularities, and we therefore

predict that the acquisition of gender will be delayed in relation to other languages

where gender is more transparent. In light of previous acquisition findings from

Norwegian as well as other languages, such as German and French (Müller 1994,

Kupisch et al. 2002), we also expect that the children may have more problems with

indefinite than with definite articles. Importantly, in order to investigate the issue of

gender vs. declension class in Norwegian (cf. the discussion in section 2), we

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compare the children’s accuracy rates on suffixed forms with forms that express

gender as agreement.

The study investigates two monolingual and two bilingual children growing up

in Tromsø. According to De Houwer (2007), the acquisition of the majority language

in bilinguals is typically unproblematic, and the bilingual children are thus not

expected to experience more problems acquiring Norwegian than their monolingual

peers. However, the children’s daily exposure to Norwegian did not start until the

age of one, and they may therefore be considered early successive bilinguals, a

category of learners where cross-linguistic influence is typically found (cf. Unsworth

et al. 2011). Furthermore, the opaque nature of the gender system of Norwegian,

which are problematic even for monolingual children, may cause even greater

delays in bilingual learners.

5. The child data

The data are extracted from spontaneous production corpora of four children, two

monolingual Norwegian children and two bilingual Norwegian-English children. The

two monolingual children, Ina and Ole, were recorded from the age of

approximately 1;9 to 3;0 (see Anderssen 2006, Westergaard 2009).

The bilingual data come from relatively restricted corpora of two girls, Emma

and Sunniva. Emma’s data have been collected by Kristine Bentzen (Bentzen 2000),

while Sunniva’s data have been provided by Merete Anderssen (not previously

published). Emma’s data were collected between the ages of 2;7.10 and 2;10.9 and

consist of seven one-hour recordings in Norwegian. She grew up in an English-

speaking home with an American mother and a Norwegian father. She had no older

siblings at the time of recording and English was used as the home language. Her

daily exposure to Norwegian started in daycare at the age of one. Until then Emma

was exposed to Norwegian outside the home, through the media, and from

Norwegian-speaking friends and family.

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There are also seven Norwegian recordings of Sunniva, made between 1;8.8 and

2;7.24, i.e. at a considerably younger age than Emma. Sunniva has a similar

background: A Norwegian mother and a British father, with English as the home

language. She had no siblings during the recording period. She was in daycare from

the age of one and until then she was exposed to Norwegian in and outside the home

in the same way as Emma. The recordings of both bilingual children were made by

native speakers of Norwegian (speaking a northern dialect very similar to the

Tromsø dialect). They were later transcribed in CHAT and double-checked by

another native speaker of Norwegian. The investigators and the transcribers are all

linguists.

An overview of the child data is provided in Table 2, which shows that we have

chosen 6-7 files of each of the monolingual children for comparison, at an age where

their MLU in words corresponds roughly to the MLU of Emma.

Table 2. Overview of the child data

Name/Language(s) Age No of files No of child

utterances

MLUw range

Emma/N-E 2;7.10-2;10.9 7 2.222 3.28-4.12

Sunniva/N-E 1;8.8-2;7.24 7 2.890 1.93-3.44

Ole/N 2;6.2-2;10.00 7 (13-19) 3.394 3.34-4.83

Ina/N 2;10.2-3;3.18 6 (22-27) 4.297 3.30-3.79

The results presented in the next section have been counted as tokens. We have

disregarded all cases where it is unclear whether the child has produced a definite

or a base form, i.e. all feminine bare definites such as jenta (‘girl’ or ‘the girl’) and all

neuter nouns ending in -e, e.g. hode(t) (‘head’ or ‘the head’), where the two forms

have identical pronunciations. Not all adjectives and possessives express gender

distinctions, e.g. some relatively frequent adjectives such as anna ‘other’ and farlig

‘dangerous’ as well as all plural adjectives (fine bila ‘nice cars.M’, fine bøker ‘nice

books.F’, fine hus ‘nice houses.N’) and plural possessives (mine bila ‘cars.M’, mine

bøker ‘my books.F’, mine hus ‘my houses.N’). Furthermore, there is no gender

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distinction in the 3rd person singular and all plural possessive determiners (e.g.

bilen hennes/våres ‘her/our car.M’, boka hennes/våres ‘her/our book.F’, huset

hennes/våres ‘her/our house.N’). All these forms have therefore been disregarded.

6. Results

6.1 Gender expressed on suffixes

Table 3 shows the results of the children’s production of suffixed forms across the

three genders. Overall, the four children’s production is generally target-consistent

with an error rate of only 2% for simple definites, 4% for indefinite plural and 6%

for definite plural forms. The table also shows that simple definite forms are the

most frequent and least problematic. In the definite plural, the children’s production

is virtually error-free with masculine and neuter nouns, which is not surprising,

given that masculine and neuter have the same suffix in this context (-an). Given

that feminine and neuter plural forms are infrequent in the data, the percentages of

the error rates must be treated with caution.

Table 3. Suffixed forms, overall results (error/total, % error)

Form Masculine Feminine Neuter Total

Def. sg. 4/484 (1%) 3/138 (4%) 10/229 (4%) 17/851 (2%)

Indef. pl. 0/157 (0%) 3/12 (25%) 5/43 (12%) 8/212 (4%)

Def. pl. 1/106 (1%) 9/24 (37%) 0/31 (0%) 10/161 (6%)

The results in Table 3 show that masculine is virtually error free across the three

suffixed forms. An analysis of the children’s errors reveals overgeneralization of the

masculine suffixes -en and –a (definite singular and indefinite plural), as well as

masculine/neuter –an (definite plural). This is illustrated in (3)-(5).

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(3) i vinduen (Emma 2;8.20)

in window.DEF.M.SG

‘in the window ’ Target: i vinduet(N)

(4) mange kua (Emma 2;9.25)

many cow.INDEF.M.PL

‘many cows’ Target: mange kue(F)

(5) alle kuan (Emma 2;9.25)

all cow.DEF.M.PL

‘all the cows’ Target: alle kuen(F)

Table 4 displays the suffixed forms produced by individual children. There is no

major difference between the monolinguals and the bilinguals, although bilingual

Emma clearly experiences the most problems with an overall error rate of 10%.

Table 4. Suffixed forms, bilinguals vs. monolinguals (error/total, % error)

Child Def. sg. Indef. pl. Def. pl. Total

Emma (N-E) 10/114 (8%) 7/57 (9%) 3/29 (10%) 20/210 (10%)

Sunniva (N-E) 3/144 (2%) 1/29 (3%) 1/22 (5%) 5/195 (3%)

Ina (N) 3/291 (1%) 0/74 (0%) 5/61 (8%) 8/427 (2%)

Ole (N) 1/292 (1%) 0/52 (0%) 1/49 (2%) 2/393 (1%)

6.2 Gender agreement

When we study the children’s production of the forms that mark gender through

agreement, a very different picture emerges. As illustrated in Table 5, the overall

error rates are rather high across all agreement forms, especially the indefinite

article, where non-target-consistent production is 63% and 71% for feminine and

neuter respectively. The majority of errors are overgeneralization of the masculine

indefinite article en, as illustrated in (6)-(7).

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Table 5. Agreement forms, overall results (error/total, % error)

Form Masculine Feminine Neuter Total

Indef. sg. 2/272 (1%) 69/109 (63%) 89/126 (71%) 160/507 (32%)

Adjectives 13/58 (22%) 4/18 (22%) 19/35 (54%) 36/111 (32%)

Possessives 12/103 (12%) 16/48 (33%) 21/73 (29%) 49/224 (22%)

(6) en mus (Emma 2;7.21)

a.M mouse.F.SG Target: ei mus

(7) en hode (Ina 2;10.2)

a.M head.N.SG Target: et hode

Recall from Table 1 that most adjectives only distinguish between a common

(masculine/feminine) and a neuter form, which may explain why the highest

percentage of adjectival errors is in the neuter (54%), cf. example (8). An exception

is the adjective liten ‘little’, which distinguishes between all three genders, and

perhaps not surprisingly, the errors in the masculine and feminine mainly involve

this adjective: In (9), the feminine form lita has been substituted for the masculine

liten, while in (10), the masculine liten is replaced by the neuter form lite. The

explanation for this is presumably that the form lite also means ‘of small quantity’,

e.g. lite mat ‘little food’, which is also frequent in the children’s input.

(8) en ny ark (Ina 2;10.2)

a new.COMM.SG sheet.N.SG

‘a new sheet’ Target: et nytt ark

(9) ei liten jenta (Ina 2;11.26)

a.F little.M.SG girl.F.SG

‘a little girl’ Target: ei lita jenta

(10) en lite sjiraff (Emma 2;7.10)

a.M little.N.SG giraffe.M.SG

‘a little giraffe’ Target: en liten sjiraff

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Possessive forms are also error-prone in all three genders, although the error rate in

the masculine is considerably lower than in the other two genders. Most of the

errors are overgeneralizations of masculine, as illustrated in (11).

(11) Mummimamma sin forkle (Sunniva 2;0.18)

Mummimamma her.M.SG apron.N.SG

‘Moominmamma’s apron’ Target: Mummimamma sitt forkle

The bilingual vs. monolingual children’s agreement production is illustrated in Table

6. Again, we see no fundamental difference between the bilingual children on the

one hand and the monolinguals on the other: All the children make similar mistakes,

and bilingual Sunniva and monolingual Ole make considerably fewer mistakes than

bilingual Emma and monolingual Ina.

Table 6. Agreement forms, bilinguals vs. monolinguals (error/total, % error)

Child Indef. sg. Adjectives Possessives Total

Emma (N-E) 70/194

(36%)

13/24 (54%) 13/36 (36%) 96/254 (38%)

Sunniva (N-E) 6/46 (13%) 1/22 (5%) 9/45 (20%) 16/113 (14%)

Ina (N) 76/173

(44%)

20/43 (47%) 14/41 (34%) 110/257 (43%)

Ole (N) 8/94 (9%) 2/22 (9%) 13/102

(13%)

23/218 (11%)

Tables 3-6 show that the acquisition of gender is more problematic in the case of

forms that express gender through agreement rather than suffixation. This is clear

across the various noun forms as well as across the individual children. In order to

investigate the difference between the statistical likelihood of producing a

declension or an agreement error, we have used a logit mixed-effects model with

form (suffix or agreement) as a fixed effect, and intercepts and correlated effects of

form which varied randomly by both child and observation type (the six forms

15

investigated). Once random variation have been accounted for, the model estimates

show that the children are on average 6.16 times as likely to produce agreement

errors compared to suffix errors (Z = 2.41, p = 0.016).3

6.3 Double definite forms

As we saw in Table 1, double definiteness is required when the DP is demonstrative

or the noun is modified by an adjective. In these cases the noun is preceded by a

prenominal determiner as well as a definite suffix. Double definite DPs are relatively

infrequent in early child data, mainly because adjectives are rarely used by young

children. The construction is also quite complex. Not surprisingly, the children

produce few relevant examples, with the exception of bilingual Emma, whose data

on definiteness is discussed in more detail in Anderssen & Bentzen (this volume).

Emma is different from the other children also in the sense that very few of her

double definites are target-consistent: Only 12% (16/134) have the correct gender

form on both the prenominal determiner and the suffix. Corresponding percentages

for the other children are 46% (11/24) for Sunniva, 76% (40/53) for Ole and 48%

(13/27) for Ina.

Table 7 shows the distribution of gender marking on the prenominal determiner

and the suffix across the three genders. There are at least two important points:

First, the totals for suffixes are lower than for determiners, which is mainly due to

Emma’s production where suffixes are spelled out less frequently than determiners

(more on this below). Second, most of the children’s mistakes occur in the neuter,

where the prenominal determiner det is replaced by the common gender form den.

The error rate on the suffix is considerably lower. An example is provided in (12).

3 We would like to thank Martin Corley for the statistical analysis of the data.

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Table 7. Gender marking on the prenominal determiner and the suffix in double

definite DPs in the child data (error/total)

Child Masculine Feminine Neuter

Det. Suffix Det. Suffix Det. Suffix

Emma (N-E) 0/78 0/9 0/48 0/7 5/6 0/0

Sunniva (N-E) 0/13 1/11 0/6 1/2 4/4 0/0

Ole (N) 2/35 0/31 1/5 0/4 4/9 0/11

Ina (N) 1/15 1/10 0/5 0/4 6/8 3/3

Total 3/141

(2%)

2/61

(3%)

1/64

(2%)

1/17

(6%)

19/27

(70%)

3/14

(21%)

(12) den store flyet (Ole 2;8.5)

the.COMM.SG big plane.DEF.N.SG

‘the big plane’ Target: det store flyet

Errors such as the one illustrated in (12) are typical of the monolingual children as

well as for bilingual Sunniva. Once again they reveal that gender marking through

agreement on the prenominal determiner is more problematic than gender marking

on the suffix. There are also many instances of the same lexical item occurring with

correct marking on the suffix, but not on the indefinite article or prenominal

determiner. This is illustrated for Ole in (13)-(14).

(13) en fly (Ole 2;8.5)

a.M.SG plane.N.SG

‘a plane’ Target: et fly

(14) inni flyet (Ole 2;8.5)

in plane.DEF.N.SG

‘in the plane’

17

In Table 7 there seems to be no fundamental difference between the bilingual and

monolingual children. However, on closer inspection bilingual Emma appears to be

different from the other three. First, she produces more forms requiring double

definites, mainly because she seems to favor demonstratives.4 She also omits

suffixes to a considerable extent.5

(15) den her skjei-Ø (Emma 2;8.7)

the.COMM.SG here spoon.DEF.F.SG

‘this spoon here’ Target: den her skjeia

In Table 8, the children’s errors of omission are considered across the three genders

with regard to the affected element, the determiner or the suffix. Both the

prenominal determiner and the suffix are occasionally omitted by Sunniva, Ole and

Ina. In Emma’s data, determiner omission is also infrequent, in contrast to suffix

omission, which occurs at a rate of 95% in the masculine and 100% in the feminine

and neuter.6

4 Emma’s apparent preference for demonstratives may also be due to transfer from English, in the sense that a regular definite is rendered as e.g. den bil instead of bilen (‘the car’). According to Anderssen & Bentzen (this volume), 19 of the examples are of this type.

5 Strictly speaking, omissions are not gender errors and are therefore not considered in the other nominal forms discussed in this paper.

6 With respect to the bare definite feminine nouns in the Tromsø dialect (e.g. ei jenta - jenta ‘a girl - the girl’), Emma is found to vacillate between the dialect form ending in -a and the standard form ending in -e in the indefinite. She therefore also produces examples such as den dukka as well as den dukke ‘that doll’. While the latter examples are clearly non-target-consistent (due to suffix omission), all the former examples have been disregarded from the count in Table 8, as it is unclear whether the form dukka is the base form or the definite. This is presumably the reason why our numbers for Emma are somewhat lower than those found in Anderssen & Bentzen (this volume). It should be noted that most of the -e forms appear in early files, while the examples with the -a ending mainly appear later, indicating that Emma is in fact making even more mistakes with suffix omission than Table 8 shows.

18

Table 8. Omission of determiner and suffix in double definite DPs

Child Masculine Feminine Neuter Total

Det. Suffix Det. Suffix Det. Suffix Det/Suffix

Emma (N-E) 5 66 0 23 0 6 5/95

Sunniva (N-E) 1 2 0 2 0 1 1/5

Ole (N) 1 3 0 0 3 0 4/3

Ina (N) 0 5 1 0 0 2 1/7

7. Discussion

7.1 Gender vs. declension classes

Recall from section 2 that gender is typically defined as agreement between the

noun and other targets. In the case of Norwegian, these other elements are the

indefinite articles, certain adjectives and some possessive forms. This means that

the definite singular and definite and indefinite plural forms, which are suffixes on

the noun itself, strictly speaking do not express gender, although they do have

distinct forms corresponding to the three genders. These endings are more

commonly referred to as expressions of declension classes. Hence, in a form such as

bilen ‘the car’, the suffix expresses that this noun belongs to the -en declension class,

which typically takes masculine gender agreement on other targets. In the indefinite

form en bil ‘a car’, on the other hand, the choice of indefinite article agrees in gender

with the masculine noun. One argument in favor of such a distinction in Norwegian

is that there are occasional mismatches between the indefinite and definite forms in

some dialects, e.g. en(M) bok – boka(F) ‘a book - the book’ (Lødrup 2011).

Our findings from the acquisition data presented in this paper support this

distinction between gender and declension class. The declensional suffixes seem to

be much easier to acquire than gender agreement (Table 3 vs. Table 5). The definite

form, for example, is produced with a target-consistent declensional suffix in 98% of

19

the child data, while the percentages for target-consistent plural suffixes is 96% and

94% for indefinites and definites respectively. The difference between the definite

singular and the two plural forms is presumably that the former is much more

frequent in the children’s input, also evidenced by the different frequencies in the

child data (cf. the raw figures). In comparison, the forms that agree with the noun

and thus express gender per se, are much more error-prone: Adjectives are target-

consistent 68%, possessives 78% and indefinite articles 68%, and the statistical

analysis shows that there is a highly significant effect of the observation type (i.e.

suffix vs. agreement) on the children’s accuracy.

One may then ask what triggers the acquisition of gender agreement in

Norwegian. As we stated in section 2, gender seems to be arbitrary, in the sense that

the phonological shape of the base form does not reveal the gender of a noun.

Furthermore, there is not much semantic agreement, at least not for the common

everyday words that are frequent in the vocabulary of a young child. One plausible

explanation is thus that children learn gender based on declensional endings. More

specifically, we would argue that gender acquisition is based on the suffixed definite

form, i.e. bilen ‘the car’, boka ‘the book’ or huset ‘the house’. The definite form is

prosodically favored by young children in that it typically constitutes a trochaic

structure (Anderssen 2006). It is also the most frequent DP form in the language,

perhaps especially in the input to children, since child and child-directed speech

typically center around the “here and now”. This form is also the most frequent one

in the child data, which becomes evident if we compare the raw numbers in Table 5

with any other table in this paper (recall also that a number of nouns have been

excluded from the count of the definite singular because they are ambiguous

between a definite and a bare form).

One example in our data that also points in this direction is Ole’s use of the noun

søppel ‘garbage’. This is one of the nouns where there is a mismatch between the

definite and the indefinite forms: The indefinite may only be neuter (et søppel),

while the definite form can be either søppelet(N) or søpla(F), the latter being the

most commonly used form. This is also the form that Ole uses in (16). Note that he is

using the correct feminine form of the possessive here, to correspond with the

20

definite suffix on the noun. He has clearly not learned the gender of this word from

the indefinite form, for example, since ei søppel ‘a.F garbage’ simply does not exist.7

(16) søpla mi (Ole 2;10.0)

garbage my.F.SG

‘my garbage’

7.2 The role of frequency

In section 5 we predicted that the acquisition of an opaque gender system such as

the Norwegian one would be delayed in relation to languages with more transparent

systems. Input frequency should thus play a role, and we therefore speculated that

bilingual children, who may have less input in Norwegian, would need even more

time to acquire both the concept of gender and the corresponding morphology. The

role of frequency in gender acquisition has been discussed extensively in Szagun et

al. (2007), who claim that ‘the role of frequency seems unclear at present’ (p. 450).

Rodina (2007) on the other hand, shows that frequency does play a role in the

acquisition of exceptional noun classes in Russian, i.e. where there is a mismatch

between morphological and semantic cues (e.g. the noun papa ‘daddy’, which is

morphologically feminine but semantically masculine).

The results of the current study show that, when the children produce non-

target-consistent forms, they generally overgeneralize to the most frequent form in

the input, which in most cases is the masculine. For example, there is massive

overgeneralization of the masculine indefinite article en to feminine and neuter

nouns. There is also overgeneralization of the common gender

(masculine/feminine) form to the neuter on adjectives. Common gender is also

overgeneralized to the neuter on the prenominal determiner in the double definite

7 Lødrup (2011) discusses a number of nouns that are not feminine but nevertheless take the suffix -a in the definite. These may only take feminine agreement on a postnominal possessive‚ while in all other forms there is normally agreement with the ‘original’ gender of the noun. This is also the case with søppel ‘garbage’: With a prenominal possessive the only correct form is neuter, i.e. mitt søppel ‘my.N garbage’, while the use of feminine here is ungrammatical (*mi søppel).

21

DPs. Furthermore, there is also overgeneralization in the declensional suffixes; the

masculine suffix -a in the indefinite plural is overgeneralized to the feminine and

neuter, while in the indefinite plural it is mainly the masculine/neuter suffix -an

which is overgeneralized to the feminine. While all these cases differ to some extent,

they have one thing in common: It is always the most frequent gender form or

declensional suffix that is overgeneralized to other contexts. This provides support

to the claim that frequency plays a major role in the acquisition of a non-transparent

gender system.

However, frequency is a relative concept, and it is unclear how much is needed

for the acquisition of a particular grammatical feature, and whether all children

need the same amount of input. Frequency in the input is also extremely difficult to

measure for individual children. In our data, we find that the two bilingual children

are very different from each other; in fact, also the two monolingual children display

considerable differences with respect to the mastery of the gender forms. Bilingual

Emma is more similar to monolingual Ina, in that they produce more non-target-

consistent forms than the other two children. In this sense, therefore, our prediction

that frequency should be responsible for a distinction between bilingual children on

the one hand and monolinguals on the other clearly does not hold. This leads us to

consider the claim made by De Houwer & Bernstein (2011) that bilingual children

do not always have only half the input in each of their languages compared to

monolingual children. They show that the variation in the amount of child-directed

speech that monolingual and bilingual children are exposed to is quite extensive,

and that it is impossible to conclude that bilingual children always have much less

input than monolinguals. Thus, given that we do not have exact input frequencies of

the different forms for the four children in our study, we cannot make any

conclusions with respect to the effect of frequency on mono- vs. bilingual

acquisition.

7.3 Knowledge of the concept of gender

22

We now turn to the question whether the children in our study actually display any

knowledge of the concept of gender in their production. For one monolingual and

one bilingual child, Ole and Sunniva, we would argue that this is clearly the case, in

that they make systematic choices in their production of forms that agree with the

noun, e.g. indefinite articles and possessives. We would also like to argue that Ina is

in the process of acquiring gender; however, she still has some problems producing

the correct morphological form in every case. Emma, on the other hand, does not

seem to display any knowledge of gender until the very last file of her data, when a

few target-consistent double definites appear. That is, although Emma produces

target-consistent declensional suffixes in many cases, she fails to distinguish the

three genders on other targets: Indefinite articles have a default form (the

masculine en), while her production of adjectives and possessive forms seems to be

subject to chance.

The indefinite article en thus does not seem to have any gender marking function

in Emma’s grammar. This may also to some extent be the case for Ina, who seems to

have special problems with the neuter, while there may be remnants of such a

system in the production of Sunniva and Ole. We may therefore ask what the

function of this prenominal element is in early child grammar. As mentioned in

section 3.1, several studies have attested similar phenomena, e.g. an overuse of

masculine indefinite articles with feminine nouns in German/French bilinguals

(Müller 1994). In this case, the indefinite article was analyzed as a numeral. This

would be a possible analysis also for our data, as the masculine indefinite article is

identical to the numeral also in Norwegian. However, given that the children make

similar mistakes also with adjectives and possessives (albeit to a lesser extent), this

does not seem to be a plausible analysis. At best, it may be an additional factor,

accounting for the somewhat greater extent to which the children overgeneralize

the indefinite article. An alternative analysis, proposed by Bottari (1993/94) for

Italian monolinguals, was that the indefinite article is simply a placeholder with

syntactic properties, but no morphophonological features. For our data, we believe

that the invariant indefinite article en does express the features indefinite and

singular in the children’s grammars; see also Anderssen (2006) for an analysis of

23

the acquisition of definiteness in Norwegian. Our finding thus seems to be more

similar to the attested overgeneralization to common gender in Dutch discussed by

Cornips & Hulk (2008): That is, the article en in the early Norwegian child data

expresses definiteness and number, but is unspecified for gender.

7.4 Bilinguals vs. monolinguals

Our results show that there is no fundamental difference between the bilingual

children on the one hand and the monolingual children on the other, as in most

contexts, monolingual Ina and bilingual Emma pattern together. Instead we find

individual differences, which are mostly quantitative. All the children experience

problems with gender agreement, but to different extents. Monolingual Ole, for

example, makes the fewest gender errors across the various DPs. Both bilingual

Emma and monolingual Ina display a relatively poor performance in the indefinite

singular compared to bilingual Sunniva and monolingual Ole. The same applies to

gender marking on adjectives and possessives.

Gender marking on double definite DPs is the only context where Emma seems

to be qualitatively different from the other children. Until the age of 2;8.20 she only

uses the demonstrative den and does not use a single suffix. There is thus no

evidence that Emma marks gender on double definites until the first and only

occurrence of neuter det (which marks gender unambiguously) is found at the age of

2;9.25. In the previous section we discussed the children’s overgeneralization of the

indefinite article en in the light of similar findings from Dutch child language

(Cornips & Hulk 2008) and argued that this element expresses definiteness and

number, but is unspecified for gender. Similarly, as Emma overuses the prenominal

determiner den in the double definite forms, this could also be argued to only

express definiteness and number in Emma’s grammar and not gender. This could

also explain why she omits the definite suffix: When definiteness is marked on the

prenominal determiner, the grammar assumes that there is no need to also spell out

definiteness on the suffix.

24

This account does not explain why the other children do not also pervasively

omit the suffix in double definite DPs. One reason could of course be that they are

beyond this stage and have already realized that the prenominal element expresses

gender and therefore include both the determiner and the suffix. That is, they may

have already gone through a (possibly brief) stage where their grammars were

identical to Emma’s grammar. However, suffix drop is hardly attested in the other

children’s grammars. Thus, a likely explanation is that this property of Emma’s

grammar is due to transfer from English, which lacks this double definite

construction; see Anderssen & Bentzen (this volume) for a more thorough

discussion of these data.

Finally, however, we should note that the other bilingual child, Sunniva, does not

experience any delay with the double definites. Thus, if Emma’s problem with this

construction is due to language transfer, we have to conclude that not all bilingual

children are affected by it. That is, our data show that the individual variation

among bilingual children is considerable and at least as great as the variation among

monolinguals.

8. Concluding remarks

In this paper we have compared the acquisition of gender in Norwegian (Tromsø) in

the corpus data of two monolingual and two bilingual Norwegian-English children.

We have found that all four children pattern alike in that they have no problems

with gender marking on suffixed forms (e.g. the definite article), but experience

great difficulties when marking gender on other targets, such as indefinite articles

or adjectives. The difference between the children’s performance on declensional

suffixes and gender agreement is statistically significant, and our acquisition data

may thus be taken as support for the distinction between gender and declension

class that is often made for Norwegian. Furthermore, we have argued that gender

acquisition is based on the suffixed definite form.

25

Given the opaque nature of gender assignment in Norwegian we predicted that

we would find frequency effects, especially in the data of the bilingual children.

Across the three genders we found that the errors that the children make reveal

overgeneralization of the most frequent forms, mainly masculine or common

gender. However, we do not find that the monolinguals always outperform the

bilinguals; instead there are substantial individual differences among the four

children.

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Yulia Rodina & Marit Westergaard

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