Poster Session 6, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM: Room 163 [C23]

Presenter: Adelaide Dietz Maloney

Faculty Sponsor:

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Linguistics and Language Studies

ABSTRACT

Many of the world’s languages make use of grammatical gender systems, wherein words, most typically nouns or pronouns, are assigned a gender. Typically, the gender of a given noun is somewhat arbitrary and only serves a function within the internal grammar of a language: not in the semantic meaning of the word. The most well-known languages to make use of such systems include Spanish, where gender is determined by suffixes. Some languages, particularly Irish, use a system called initial consonant mutation (ICM) to distinguish between different genders. Here, the first sound of a noun changes based on sentence structure and word gender. Many Irish speakers, who are near-universally bilingual with English and often speak Irish as a second language, make errors producing these mutations. The question, then, is whether they make errors because of the system itself or English influence; English has no gender system. This study seeks to determine whether speaking a native language with grammatical gender affects how effectively they are able to acquire a novel grammatical gender system. We create an artificial language whose grammatical gender system makes use of Irish-like ICM. We then teach participants these rules and test them on how well they are able to reproduce the new grammar via an online quiz format. This test is  administered to native English and Spanish speakers, whose responses are then analyzed via a t-test to look at whether one group is significantly more reliable than the other in reproducing the artificial language’s grammar.