title: Children's Production of Subject-Verb Agreement in Hebrew When Gender and Context are Ambiguous.
abstract: Third and 5th grade Hebrew-speaking children performed two sentence completion tasks, one requiring the assignment of male, female, or gender-ambiguous names and the inflection of verbs for male-stereotyped, female-stereotyped, and gender-neutral activities, and the other task, of inflecting verbs for male- and female-stereotyped activities performed by children with gender-ambiguous names. The question of concern was whether when faced with the need to inflect verbs to match the conceptual gender of the sentence subject, the gender-stereotyped nature of the activities in question and children's own gender would play a role in resolving the dilemma created by gender-ambiguous names and contexts. In both parts of the study, we found that (1) children's own gender played a role in determining the pattern of verb inflection, and (2) children used their semantic knowledge regarding the gender-stereotyped nature of activities to inflect verbs so as to create subject-verb agreement. Hence, subject-verb agreement in children draws on both their grammatical and semantic knowledge.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69908, Israel. rkarniol@post.tau.ac.il.
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Karniol
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69908, Israel.
authors.forename: Sigal
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Artzi
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69908, Israel.
authors.forename: Maya
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ludmer
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007557:Israel; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods; D012660:Semantics; D012737:Sex Factors; D013240:Stereotyping
keywords: Gender stereotypes; Gender-ambiguity; Hebrew; Verb agreement; Verb inflection