¿Cómo determinan los niños la concordancia de género?refutación de la teoría del género natural

Abstract

Data from an experiment on gender development in 160 Spanish children 4 to 11 years of age are presented in this paper. In the Spanish language there are three possible information cues (semantic, morphophonologic, and syntactic) which speakers can use to determine the gender of a noun and its agreement with other variable elements accompanying it. In this study, these where experimentally manipulated to produce all possible combinations. Thus subjects were presented 1) items in which only one of the cues was present, 2) items with a combined effect of two cues in agreement (i.e., both of them feminine, or masculine), and 3) items with cues in conflict (e.g., one of them masculine and the other feminine). This experimental manipulation enabled us to test the relative strength of the different types of competing cues. The results obtained with Spanish speaking children (which are compared with data obtained in other languages) supports the theoretical view that children pay far more attention to syntactic and morphophonological (intralinguistic) information than to semantic (extralinguistic) information.