University of SaskatchewanHARVEST
  • Login
  • Submit Your Research
  • About
    • About HARVEST
    • Guidelines
    • Browse
      • All of HARVEST
      • Communities & Collections
      • By Issue Date
      • Authors
      • Titles
      • Subjects
      • This Collection
      • By Issue Date
      • Authors
      • Titles
      • Subjects
    • My Account
      • Login
      JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
      View Item 
      • HARVEST
      • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
      • View Item
      • HARVEST
      • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
      • View Item

      The acquisition of gender: Differences between monolingual Brazilian Portuguese and bilingual Portuguese-English children

      Thumbnail
      View/Open
      PRUDENTEDEMORAESGOLDBACH-THESIS-2020.pdf (855.7Kb)
      Date
      2021-03-08
      Author
      Prudente de Moraes Goldbach, Amanda
      ORCID
      0000-0002-2563-0039
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
      Show full item record
      Abstract
      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
      Linguistics
      Program
      Linguistics
      Supervisor
      Spreng, Bettina
      Committee
      Stewart, Jesse; Li, Zhi; Teucher, Ulrich; Kohlberger, Martin
      Copyright Date
      December 2020
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/13277
      Subject
      Grammatical gender
      childhood language acquisition
      bilingual language acquisition
      bilingualism
      monolingualism
      Brazilian Portuguese
      Canadian English
      first language acquisition
      2L1 language acquisition
      Collections
      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations

      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 ...
      • A PC-based data acquisition system for sub-atomic physics measurements 

        Chabot, Daron (2008)
        Modern particle physics measurements are heavily dependent upon automated data acquisition systems (DAQ) to collect and process experiment-generated information. One research group from the University of Saskatchewan ...
      • Response acquisition of Indian and non-Indian jail inmates 

        Hui, Sincheung Cynthia (1965-06-01)
        The purpose of this research was to evaluate response acquisition of Indian Ss relative to non-Indian Ss and to examine the relationships between questionnaire and performance data. A questionnaire, based on Harding's ...
      University of Saskatchewan

      University Library

      © University of Saskatchewan
      Contact Us | Disclaimer | Privacy