What do asymmetries in children’s performance tell us about the nature of their underlying knowledge?

Abstract

This paper examines the course of acquisition of the semantic gender criterion by studying children’s overregularization rates with two subtypes of Russian nouns: male kinship terms and male names in –a. Twenty-five Russian children aged 2;6-4;0 participated in this empirical study. The asymmetry found in their agreement production for the individual male kinship terms is explained along the lines of the Words and Rules model (Pinker 1999). That is, the asymmetry between the high- and low-frequency nouns is attributed to input frequencies. Yet, frequency is not the only factor which is responsible for the asymmetries children’s production. In addition, the differences in the semantic representation of proper names vs. common nouns may be another factor that plays a role.