Abstract
This study investigates linguistic prediction based on grammatical gender in Italian-German bilingual children aged six to ten, using a visual world eye-tracking paradigm. Children listened to sentences while looking at objects that either matched or mismatched in grammatical gender, and that varied with respect to cross-linguistic gender congruency. To explore the effect of language dominance on processing, we tested children in bilingual schools in Italy and Germany, with an experiment in Italian (N=63) and in German (N=25). Results show rapid predictive processing, as children anticipated nouns based on the grammatical gender of articles. Furthermore, in the Italian task (but not in the German task), children exhibited a ‘gender congruency effect’, i.e., they showed cross-linguistic influence when the grammatical gender of the two languages did not overlap, leading to delayed anticipation. In contrast to previous research, this effect was also observed in simultaneous bilingual children. Both the extent to which children relied on predictive processing and the likelihood of a gender congruency effect were related to children’s language dominance, operationalized as relative language proficiency in terms of vocabulary knowledge.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5-27 |
| Journal | Lingue e linguaggio |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
1This project was funded by the EU’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 765556, as a part of the MultiMind project. We are grateful to the children and families who took part and to the teachers and directors of the schools. We thank Chiara Saponaro, Riccardo Zanaboni and Maren Eikerling for helping with data collection; Giulia Mornati, Maren Eikerling and Mathilde Chailleux for their help in creating and implementing the materials; Carlo Toneatto for technical support.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| EU’s Horizon2020 | 765556 |