1. Tócalo, tócala: Bilingual children's comprehension and production of grammatical gender in Spanish
Naomi Shin, Barbara Rodríguez, Aja Armijo, Molly Perara-Lunde, University of New Mexico
Context: Bilingual language development
The majority of dual language learning kindergartners in the U.S. are
Children who are first exposed to English upon entering school are at a higher risk for being diagnosed with language impairment (LI) because assessments use monolingual norms.
We need to better understand typical bilingual language development in order to distinguish between language learning and language impairment in young dual language children.
Grammatical Gender
Morphophonological properties provide a cue for gender in most Spanish nouns (masculine -o vs. feminine –a)
Articles, adjectives, and direct object clitics are marked for gender
By age 3, monolingual Spanish-speaking children can use the gender of an article as a cue for referent identification (Lew-Williams and Fernald, 2007)
By age 5, children can reliably produce articles that agree with nouns they modify (Castilla & Pérez-Leroux 2010).
Direct Objects (DO) clitics lo/la/los/las hallmarked as difficult for
1) monolingual children with language impairment
2) for bilingual children (Anderson 1999; Castilla-Earls et al. 2015)
Purpose of Study
To test comprehension and production of DO clitic gender in bilingual children
Results
Mixed:
Production of gender: x̅ = 87% accurate; SD = 17%
Comprehension of gender: x̅ = 52% accurate; SD = 20%
Opposite of what we expected.
Generally, we expect production to be more challenging than comprehension. 
Possible explanations
Methodological issue: Using a pointing task to demonstrate explicit comprehension of gender may result in unreliable estimates of children’s understanding (Pérez-Leroux 2014:2).
Lag in comprehension for pronouns: Other scholars have found that children produce pronouns accurately by around age 3, but misinterpret pronouns even as late as age 6;6. (Hendricks & Spenader 2006).
Implications
Comprehension tasks are common in the school setting and it is generally assumed that comprehension is easier than production
We need to understand how and why children perform differently on comprehension and production tasks in order to 1) develop appropriate assessments for clinicians and 2) to further our understanding of bilingual language acquisition
Methodology
Task 1: DO comprehension
Children are shown pictures of objects, half of which are a masculine referent (e.g. el libro) and half of which are a feminine referent (e.g. la mesa)
Children are instructed to touch one of the pictures when they hear tócalo or tócala.
Example: a child is presented with a picture of a book (el libro) and a table (la mesa), and hears “tócalo”.
They should touch the picture of the book because of the masculine clitic –lo.
Task 2: DO production (based on Gruter, 2005)
Children are presented with pictures and told a story about a girl named Marisol.
Children are asked questions that elicit their production of lo or la.
Example: Es de mañana y Marisol se acaba de levantar. Se acerca a la ventana. ¿Qué hace con la ventana? (‘It’s morning and Marisol just got up. She goes to the window. What does she do with the window?’)
Expected response = la abre or la cierra (‘she opens it’ or ‘she closes it’).
Research Questions
How do Spanish-speaking children learn patterns of gender assignment and agreement?
Does the comprehension-before-production trajectory found for gender of articles also apply to DO clitics?
Hypotheses
Children with strong Spanish language skills would show accuracy in comprehension of DO grammatical gender
Children who evidence strong comprehension of grammatical gender may overuse the masculine DO clitics lo instead of the feminine la when speaking
References
Anderson, R. (1999). Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition. Preliminary results. Bilingual Research Journal, 23,
Castilla, A.P. & Pérez-Leroux, A.T. (2010). Omissions and substitutions in Spanish object clitics:
Developmental optionality as a property of the representational system. Language Acquisition 17, 2-25.
Castilla-Earls, A., M.A. Restrepo, A.T. Pérez-Leroux, S. Gray, P. Holmes, D. Gail, & Z. Chen. (2015). Interactions between Bilingual Effects and Language Impairment: Exploring Grammatical Markers in Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1–27.
Grüter, T. (2005). Comprehension and production of French object clitics by child second language learners and children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26,
Hendricks, P. & Spenader, J. (2006). When production precedes comprehension. An optimization approach to the acquisition of pronouns. Language Acquisition, 13(4),
Lew-Williams, C. & Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science 18,
Pérez-Leroux, Ana. (2014). How Children Learn to Detect and Interpret Agreement Morphology: A Crosslinguistic Perspective. Lingua 144, 1–6.
Participants
18 pre-school children
10 males, 8 females
47-67 months (x̅=58, SD=5.4)
Strong Spanish skills (TVIP score x̅=90.28, SD = 18)
Acknowledgements
Funding: Sociological Initiatives Foundation, UNM Research Allocations Committee
Youth Development, Inc. (YDI), especially Anna Marie García and Head Start teachers, families, and children.
Yvonne Martínez-Ingram for constant support and help.