Arias-Trejo, N. & Alva Canto, E. A.
Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM, Mexico City
In Spanish, the most common rule for assigning gender is that for nouns ending in ‘a’, the grammatical gender is feminine and for nouns ending in ‘o’ is masculine. Toddlers are sensitive to article-noun gender agreement (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007). Furthermore, 30-month-olds use adjective gender-markers to infer an unnamed referent (Arias-Trejo, Falcón, & Alva-Canto, 2010). However, at present it remains unclear whether toddlers benefit from exposure to gender information contained in alternative grammatical categories such as verbs. In a preferential looking task (Golinkoff, Hirsch-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we explored whether the endings ‘lo’ (masculine) and ‘la’ (feminine) at the end of imperative verbs provided toddlers with sufficient information to infer an unnamed referent. In each trial toddlers saw two different-gender pictures and heard an imperative verb with a gender marker included at the end (e.g., míralo or mírala). Thirty-six-month-olds, but not 30-month-olds, correctly inferred the unnamed referent, demonstrating an extraordinary ability to extract gender cues from different grammatical categories other than nouns to correctly infer a target. This ability might enhance a more rapid and accurate online language processing. Age differences suggest a developmental change in toddlers’ ability to capture informative gender cues in online language processing.