The acquisition of gender: Differences between monolingual Brazilian Portuguese and bilingual Portuguese-English children
Date
2021-03-08Author
Prudente de Moraes Goldbach, Amanda
ORCID
0000-0002-2563-0039Type
ThesisDegree Level
MastersMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This thesis reports on the results of research investigating the early acquisition of grammatical gender in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) monolingual (L1) and BP- Canadian English bilingual (2L1) children. BP has a two-gender system, with nouns being, grammatically speaking, either masculine or feminine. Canadian English does not present grammatically-gendered nouns. As such, the bilingual (2L1) acquisition of both languages raises the question of whether there will be attrition between the distinct grammatical gender systems. That is, does the acquisition of a grammatically ungendered language such as English Studies influence the acquisition of grammatical gender in the other language (in this case, BP)? Studies in monolingual gender agreement acquisition have already been conducted in Portuguese (Corrêa & Name, 2003; Correa, Augusto & Castro, 2010) and other Romance languages, but they do not account for bilingual acquisition. This is the first study to address the difference between L1 acquisition of BP and 2L1 acquisition where the other concomitant L1 does not present gendered nouns. I compare the rate of acquisition of the grammatical gender system of BP in a L1 context and in a 2L1 BP-CE context. The initial hypothesis of this research is that bilingual Brazilian Portuguese-Canadian English children will demonstrate later grammatical gender acquisition. This will result in later production of correct determiner-noun-adjective gender agreement when compared to monolingual Brazilian children. The results of this study support this hypothesis. Monolingual and bilingual acquisition were compared through elicited production tasks. In these tasks, grammatical gender was attributed to nonce nouns, and children were then asked to produce gender agreement in determiners and adjectives. The tests measured the effects of acquiring a non-gendered language (English) on children’s process of acquiring and producing gender agreement in another language (BP). Bilingual children produced significantly less correct grammatical gender inflections than their similarly-aged monolingual peers. This demonstrates that bilingual children start the grammatical gender acquisition process later than their monolingual counterparts and take a longer time to master the grammatical gender system of BP completely. The data was collected in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada and in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The participants were 23 monolingual children and 21 bilingual children, between the ages of 2.4 and 5.2 years old.
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)Department
LinguisticsProgram
LinguisticsSupervisor
Spreng, BettinaCommittee
Stewart, Jesse; Li, Zhi; Teucher, Ulrich; Kohlberger, MartinCopyright Date
December 2020Subject
Grammatical gender
childhood language acquisition
bilingual language acquisition
bilingualism
monolingualism
Brazilian Portuguese
Canadian English
first language acquisition
2L1 language acquisition
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
The Effect of Targets’ Organizational Capital on Acquirers’ Abnormal Returns
Hao, Yimeng 1992- (2016-09-27)Literature has shown that organizational capital is an important production factor and is positively related with firm value, Tobin’s Q, stock returns and executive compensation. We examine whether this organizational ... -
Challenging the French immersion orthodoxy : student stories and counterstories
Quiring, Suzanne Gabrielle (2008)Through this study I have provided an understanding of what French immersion was like for children who left the program. I have considered an important aspect of the French immersion program that has been neglected in the ... -
DEVELOPMENT OF A FIELD-BASED MOBILE PLATFORM FOR PLANT PHENOTYPING
Bayati, Mostafa 1988- (2018-01-04)Design, implementation and performance verification of an affordable field-based high-throughput plant phenotyping platform for monitoring Canola plants, including both data acquisition/visualization software and measurement ...