L1 acquisition of neuter gender in Dutch: production and judgement

Publication Summary

Previous research indicates that grammatical gender in Dutch, and in particular neuter gender, is typically acquired late, with children overgeneralising common gender forms of the determiner to neuter nouns until (at least) age 6 (e.g., Blom et al. 2008, Bol and Kuiken, 1988, Van der Velde, 2003). Almost all of these previous studies use production data only. It is possible that these data may underestimate children’s knowledge of Dutch gender. In this paper, we present data from production and judgement tasks carried out with the same children in order to determine whether this is the case. Furthermore, we examine the relationship between production and judgement data to more fully explore the developmental trajectory involved in the acquisition of Dutch gender.