Studies of children and their use of grammatical gender in language indicate:
A) different results from studies of adults.
B) similar results to studies of adults.
C) that Spanish-speaking children do not encode gender into their language at a young age.
D) that English-speaking children have mixed use of gender categories at a young age.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Studies of children and their use of grammatical gender in language show similar results to studies of adults, indicating that children acquire gender categories at a young age and use them in a similar way to adults. In many languages, including Spanish, children as young as 2 years old show evidence of gender encoding in their speech. While English does not have grammatical gender, studies of English-speaking children show that they actively use gender information in their pronoun use and in assigning genders to inanimate objects, indicating that gender plays a role in language acquisition even in languages without grammatical gender.

Studies of Children and Their Use of Grammatical Gender in Language