The Development of Lexical Knowledge: Toward a Model of the Acquisition of Lexical Gender in French

This paper attempts to answer a threefold question: from what kind of cues gender can reliably be assigned to French nouns? How the usage of these sublexical cues is acquired by children? What kind of computational models could account for the human data? We conducted an experiment with 73 1 and 2 grade children to assess their knowledge about gender information associated with suffixes using a gender decision task. Children had to assign gender to pseudo-words whose endings correspond to French suffixes (-ture, -ment...). Results show that French children implicitly acquire this knowledge, even before learning to read. Simulation results fit experimental data and show that the word ending represented by suffixes is one of the main cues to assign gender to French words.