Research on early grammatical gender processing: what do we know about Spanish-speaking children?

Abstract

This paper reviews recent research on grammatical gender acquisition and processing by speakers of Spanish. We consider studies on monolingual, bilingual, heritage speakers, and children diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The main focus of this article is to review research on how Spanish-speaking toddlers process grammatical gender information during sentence comprehension. According to the results of the reviewed research, the course of gender acquisition in DLD children seems to differ from typically developing monolingual children. Furthermore, from early on typically developing Spanish-speaking are sensitive to distributional co-occurrences of gender, i.e., gender information embedded in the determiners and adjectives. The review also includes studies on grammatical gender processing by adults that have shown a facilitation effect of transparent gender on noun recognition.