Sensitivity to microvariation in bilingual acquisition: morphophonological gender cues in Russian heritage language

Abstract Previous research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that this property is acquired early in transparent systems such as Russian. However, it not clear to what extent children are sensitive assignment cues and they simply memorize correspondences between frequent lexical items. Furthermore, we do know if bilingual different from monolingual respect. This article reports a study investigating children’s sensitivity A group 64 German–Russian living Germany participated study, well 107 controls Russia. The elicitation experiments used both real nonce words, noun phrases with mismatched (where morphophonological shape cued one agreement modifying adjective another). results show bilinguals monolinguals highly cues, more fine-grained regularities situations where there ambiguity. There also an age effect, showing younger pay attention cue itself, thus displaying preference for regular patterns, while older other targets.