"Gender as a morphosyntactic feature is arguably "an endlessly fascinating linguistic category" (Corbett 2014: 1). One may even say it is among "the most puzzling of the grammatical categories" (Corbett 1991: 1) that has raised probing questions from various theoretical and applied perspectives. Most languages display semantic and/or formal gender systems with various degrees of opacity and complexity, and even closely related languages present distinct differences, creating difficulties for second language learners. The first three chapters of this volume present critical reviews in three different areas - gender assignment in mixed noun phrases, subtle gentle biases and the gender acquisition in child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish - while the next six chapters present new empirical evidence in the acquisition of gender by bilingual children, adult L2/L3 learners and heritage speakers of various languages such as Italian, German, Dutch or Mandarin-Italian"--.

• The Acquisition of Gender
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• About the contributors
• Chapter 1. Introduction: Gender, geslag, Geschlecht, γένος, ਲਿੰਗ, 性別
  • What is gender?
  • Chapters in this volume
  • References
• Part I. Review chapters
• Chapter 2. Gender assignment in mixed noun phrases: State of the art
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Linguistic factors
    • 2.1 Translation equivalent strategy
    • 2.2 Shape-based strategy
    • 2.3 Default strategy
    • 2.4 Child code-switching patterns
  • 3. Extralinguistic factors
    • 3.1 Type of bilingual
    • 3.2 Task type
    • 3.3 Community norms
    • 3.4 Child language acquisition
  • 4. Discussion and future perspectives
    • 4.1 Bilingual profile
    • 4.2 Mental representation of gender
    • 4.3 The notion of default
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • The following abbreviations are used in this chapter
  • References
  • Appendix 1. Overview of the studies reported in Section 2, their main gender assignment strategy, language pair(s) and their respective number of genders (in brackets), data collection type and age group studied
• Chapter 3. Empirical evidence for gender biases in language
  • 1. Empirical evidence for gender biases in language
  • 2. Linguistic phenomena representing biases
    • 2.1 Linguistic intergroup and expectancy bias
    • 2.2 Negation bias
    • 2.3 Irony bias
    • 2.4 Male bias in “generic” masculine and “gender-fair” alternatives
    • 2.5 Gender mismatch effects as indicators of biases
  • 3. Social agency and its linguistic representations
    • 3.1 Verbs as markers of agency
    • 3.2 Case syncretism
    • 3.3 Thematic agents
  • 4. Conclusions
  • References
• Chapter 4. The acquisition of grammatical gender in child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish: Beyond the source of differences
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Gender expression in Spanish and English
  • 3. The nature of differences in heritage language bilingualism
  • 4. Previous research in the acquisition of grammatical gender
  • 5. Beyond the source of differences: The bilingual alignment approach
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
• Part II. Child, adult and heritage speakers
• Chapter 5. The second language acquisition of grammatical gender and number in Italian
  • 1. Grammatical gender and number assignment in Italian
    • 1.1 Noun classes and vocalic endings
    • 1.2 Determiners as gender markers
    • 1.3 Compounds, grammatical homonyms and other idiosyncrasies
  • 2. Grammatical gender and minimalism: Theory and L2 acquisition
  • 3. Literature review
  • 4. Methodology and research questions
    • 4.1 Research questions
    • 4.2 Participants
    • 4.3 Tasks and stimuli
  • 5. Results
    • 5.1 Pre-test
    • 5.2 Gender assignment task
  • 6. Discussion and conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix A
• Chapter 6. Grammatical gender and article use in beginning learners of German
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Grammatical gender and articles in German
  • 3. The acquisition and processing of gender and articles in German L2/L3
    • 3.1 Gender processing in advanced learners of German
    • 3.2 Gender processing in beginning learners of German
    • 3.3 The Parasitic Model and gender transfer
  • 4. Methods
    • 4.1 Research questions
    • 4.2 Participants
    • 4.3 Tasks and procedure
    • 4.4 Statistical analyses
  • 5. Results
    • 5.1 Gender and indefinite article use
    • 5.2 Gender and definite article use
    • 5.3 Learners’ sensitivity to gender cues
  • 6. Discussion
    • 6.1 Accuracy of article use and sensitivity to gender cues
    • 6.2 CLI and other factors affecting article use and gender assignment
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • References
• Chapter 7. The non-default gender category in additional-language French
  • Introduction
  • 1. Background
    • 1.1 Grammatical gender in French
    • 1.2 Analyzing targetlikeness: Errors and defaults
    • 1.3 Targetlikeness and the acquisition of grammatical gender
  • 2. Method
    • 2.1 Data and participants
    • 2.2 Data coding
    • 2.3 Data analysis
  • 3. Results
  • 4. Discussion
  • 5. Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix. Details for the random effect for participants
• Chapter 8. Investigating grammatical gender agreement in Spanish: A methodological exploration of eye tracking
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Literature review
    • 2.1 Eye tracking and grammatical gender agreement
    • 2.2 Knowledge implemented in the violation detection paradigm
  • 3. Method
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Eye-tracking materials
    • 3.3 Vocabulary posttest
    • 3.4 Post-reading questionnaire
    • 3.5 Procedure and apparatus
    • 3.6 Data analysis
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 Reading times on determiner-noun agreement
    • 4.2 Reading times on noun-adjective agreement
    • 4.3 Post-reading questionnaire
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 9. Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual grammars: Evidence from gender assignment in unilingual Dutch and mixed speech
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The nominal domain in Dutch, Spanish, Turkish and Papiamento
  • 3. The Turkish-, Spanish- and Papiamento-speaking communities in the Netherlands
  • 4. Dutch gender in bilinguals
  • 5. Gender in code-switching
  • 6. Research questions and hypotheses
  • 7. Methodology
    • 7.1 Procedure
    • 7.2 Materials
    • 7.3 Participants
    • 7.4 Coding
  • 8. Analysis and results
    • 8.1 Unilingual Dutch mode
    • 8.2 Code-switching mode
  • 9. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix A. Objects and colors used in the Director-Matcher task
  • Appendix B.
• Chapter 10. Prediction on the basis of gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Literature review
    • 2.1 Processing of grammatical gender
    • 2.2 Processing of number
    • 2.3 The discrepancy between gender and number
  • 3. Methods
    • 3.1 Hypotheses and predictions
    • 3.2 Participants
    • 3.3 Task and materials
    • 3.4 Procedure
    • 3.5 Analysis
  • 4. Results
  • 5. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • References
• Language index
• Name index
• Subject index