AUTHOR=Karayiannis Demetris , Kambanaros Maria , Grohmann Kleanthes K. , Alexiadou Artemis 

TITLE=Assignment of Grammatical Gender in Heritage Greek

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=12

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717449

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717449

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in Heritage Greek as acquired by children (6–8 years of age) and adolescents (15–18 years) growing up in Adelaide, South Australia. The determiner elicitation task from <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B25">Varlokosta (2005)</xref> was employed to assess the role of morphological and semantic cues when it comes to gender assignment for real and novel nouns. <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B19">Ralli’s (1994)</xref> inflectional classes for Greek nouns and <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B6">Anastasiadi-Symeonidi and Cheila-Markopoulou’s (2003)</xref> categories of prototypicality were employed in the analysis of the collected data. The performance of heritage speakers was compared to that of monolingual speakers from Greece (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B26">Varlokosta, 2011</xref>). The results indicate that–beyond age differences in the two groups–a formal phonological rule guides gender assignment in the production of heritage speakers which departs from initial expectations.</p>