# Grammatical gender in spoken word recognition in school-age Spanish monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children

## TL;DR

This study explores how Spanish-speaking children and bilingual children process grammatical gender in spoken language, finding that English exposure and age affect comprehension.

## Contribution

The study introduces new insights into how cumulative English exposure and age influence grammatical gender processing in child language comprehension.

## Key findings

- All children used grammatical gender to facilitate word recognition during the noun region.
- Comprehension was inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical.
- Children with more English exposure looked at target nouns less frequently overall.

## Abstract

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0–10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items.