Gender Assignment in Spanish-German Bilinguals: The Gender System and Background Factors

Abstract

This paper investigates the development of gender assignment and the role of background factors on gender assignment in Spanish-German bilinguals. While Spanish offers a transparent gender system with little difficulties for children, the German gender system is opaque with few reliable rules. This study investigated 33 simultaneous bilinguals between 5;0 and 8;11 living in Spain and Germany. Results show that Spanish gender seems to undergo an earlier acquisition than German gender. Lexical skills play a bigger role in Spanish gender acquisition than in German and gender accuracy in both languages is differently affected by factors such as age, balanced bilingualism, country of residence, language proficiency or cognitive variables. This indicates that an opaque system takes more time to be acquired. Also, the idea of a general linguistic capacity is proposed, and further theories derived from the results discussed.