Infants' Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies

To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants' early sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where the article form is dictated by the noun's gender). This study therefore examines whether French-learning 18-month-olds track such relationships. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, infants were presented with article-noun sequences in which the gender-marked article either matched (e.g., la(FEM)poussette(FEM) the stroller) or mismatched (e.g., le(MASC)poussette(FEM)) the gender of the noun. A clear preference for correct over incorrect co-occurrences was observed, suggesting that by 18months of age, children's storage and access of words is sufficiently sophisticated to include the means to track subcategorical dependencies. This early sensitivity to gender information may be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access during online language processing.