Welsh grammatical gender exhibits several unusual properties. This paper argues that these properties are necessarily connected. The argument is based on a series of corpus investigations using techniques from statistical natural language processing, specifically distinguishing properties that exhibit significant statistical patterns from those which can be used to make useable predictions. Specifically, it’s shown that the grammatical properties of Welsh gender are such that its unusual statistical properties follow.

Research on the acquisition of grammatical gender has shown that for many languages, children gain an early command of gender. However, often in these languages gender marking is quite overt and provides a clear one-to-one correspondence between a marker and the gender encoded. In Welsh, gender marking is more complex. Gender is marked by mutations, a set of morphophonological changes that affect the initial consonants of words, and the mapping between mutation and gender is quite opaque. Two mutation types are used in part to mark feminine gender: both feminine nouns modified by the definite article and adjectives following feminine nouns undergo Soft Mutation, and the feminine gender of the possessive adjective ei is marked by Aspirate Mutation on the modified noun. The four studied in this thesis examined children's productive command of gender as expressed in the mutation of nouns modified by the definite article, of adjectives modifying nouns, and of nouns modified by the homonymic feminine and masculine possessive adjective. Mutation in non-gendered contexts was also examined. Subjects were 4- to 9 1I2-year-old children from North Wales. First, a seminaturalistic study was conducted to obtain knowledge about children's ability with gender marking. A Cloze procedure was also used to elicit children's production of masculine and feminine forms, both real words and nonsense forms, in a variety of linguistic contexts. Some of these contexts provided cues to gender status, some did not. The data obtained indicated that the acquisition of the Welsh gender system is a drawn-out process, and children have not mastered the system even by 9 112years of age. In addition, children become proficient in marking feminine nouns modified by the definite article and adjectives modifying feminine nouns before they do so on nouns modified by feminine ei. Results suggest that when a language has a complex gender system that is marked by opaque morpho-phonological processes the course of development is protracted and variable.

The present thesis investigates grammatical gender processing in French as a first and second language. It focuses mainly on whether non-native speakers can achieve native-like representation and processing of gender, and whether the native language (L1) influences the acquisition of the second language (L2). Theoretical linguistic models have made two contrasting assumptions concerning the ability of late bilinguals to acquire grammatical gender in their L2. While some models propose that grammatical features, such as gender, are no longer available for L2 acquisition if they are not present in L1 (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), others assume that these features are still available via the universal grammar if required in the L2 (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; White, 1989, 2003). These assumptions, however, are supported only by off-line studies and do not provide a comprehensive account for gender representation and processing. The present thesis uses online techniques to address these questions both in language comprehension and language production. The first chapters are devoted to comprehension processes and examined French native speakers, English-French and German-French bilinguals’ performance during the processing of correct and syntactically anomalous sentences, using ERPs and eye-movements to record behaviour. We concluded that, like native speakers, English-French bilinguals are sensitive to gender agreement violations. Thus, we argue that late bilinguals are able to acquire the gender system of their L2 even if this grammatical feature is not present in their L1. On the other hand, the performance of the German speakers we tested suggests that the presence of a competing gender system in the native language may hamper gender acquisition in L2. The influence of the native language may vary, however, according to both proficiency and how gender systems map across languages, as suggest the results we obtained with Spanish bilinguals tested in language production. In a second series of experiments, we examined determiner selection in French to further investigate gender representation and processing, but in language production. Using a picture-word interference paradigm, we compared the production of simple and complex noun phrases (NP) in French native speakers, English-French and Spanish-French bilinguals. From our results, we argue that gender representation is similar in L1 and L2, but that gender processing is less incremental in non-native speakers in that they do not compute agreement between the noun and other elements of the NP as automatically as native speakers do. The absence of interference between the two gender systems of the Spanish-French bilinguals we tested suggests that the gender systems of the two languages may be autonomous in highly proficient bilinguals. Our results suggest that highly proficient bilinguals can reach native-like representation and processing of gender in their L2 and that such is not constrained by either the age of onset of learning or the grammar of the learners L1.

abstract: Purpose: The present study examined grammatical gender use in child Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) in order to determine whether the differences observed in their grammar, when compared to Spanish monolinguals, stem from an incompletely acquired grammar, in which development stops, or from a restructuring process, in which features from the dominant and the weaker language converge to form a new grammatical system. In addition, this study evaluated whether the differences usually found in comprehension are also present in production. Finally, this study evaluates if HSs differences are the result of the input available to them. Method: One-hundred and four typically developing children, 48 HSs and 58 monolingual, were selected based on two age groups (Preschool vs. 3rd Grade). Two comprehension and three production experimental tasks were designed for the three different grammatical structures where Spanish expresses gender (determiners, adjectives, and clitic pronouns). Linear mixed-models were used to examine main effects between groups and grammatical structures. Results: Results from this study showed that HSs scored significantly lower than monolingual speakers in all tasks and structures; however, 3rd-Grade HSs had higher accuracy than PK-HSs. Error patterns were similar between monolinguals and HSs. Moreover, the commonly reported overgeneralization of the masculine form seems to decrease as HSs get older. Conclusion: These results suggest that HSs’ do not face a case of Incomplete Acquisition or Restructured Grammatical gender system, but instead follow a protracted language development in which grammatical skills continue to develop after preschool years and follow the same developmental patterns as monolingual children / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Speech and Hearing Science 2018

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In the last few decades, there has been increased interest in the incorporation of data from bi- and multilingual individuals in linguistic theory: from second language acquisition and language attrition to heritage varieties and code-switching. This dissertation discusses a range of ways in which code-switching data can provide insight into the mechanisms that underlie linguistic structures. The data will be analysed within the framework of Minimalist Generative syntax and Distributed Morphology.The first part investigates grammatical gender assignment in code- switching between English, a language without grammatical gender, and two languages with grammatical gender: French and Belgian Dutch. These languages have comparable, but different gender systems. French has two genders: masculine and feminine, whereas Belgian Dutch adds a third: neuter. The study in this part of the dissertation compares gen- der assignment strategies in bilinguals with different profiles. In addition, the code-switching data provide evidence against the default status of neuter in Belgian Dutch.The second part focuses on word order and includes two studies: one on verb-second word order in Dutch-English code-switching and one on adverb placement in English-French and Dutch-English code- switching. The verb-second chapter identifies a lacuna in the traditional Generative analysis for verb second and uses the CS data to address this. The chapter on adverb position looks at placement of the adverb between the verb and its direct object, which is allowed in Dutch and French, but not in English. For all domains investigated, it is found that the finite verb predicts word order.Taken together, these studies demonstrate that bilingual data can shine a light on elements of the theory of grammar which remain in the shadows when only monolingual data is used. / Les dernières décennies ont vu croître l’intérêt pour l’intégration à la réflexion en linguistique théorique des données produites par des locuteurs/trices bilingues ou multilingues, que celles-ci concernent l’acquisition d’une langue seconde, l’attrition, les langues d’héritage ou l’alternance codique. Le présent travail développe plusieurs exemples où les données issues de l’alternance codique éclairent les mécanismes qui sous-tendent les structures linguistiques. Les données recueillies sont interprétées dans le cadre de la syntaxe générative minimaliste et de la morphologie distribuée (« distributed morphology »).Dans un premier temps, nous analysons l’attribution du genre grammatical dans l’alternance entre l’anglais, d’une part, et le français et le néerlandais de Belgique, de l’autre. Alors qu’il n’y a pas en anglais de genre grammatical, le français et le néerlandais de Belgique marquent ce genre, mais de façon différente :si le français distingue deux genres, masculin et féminin, le néerlandais de Belgique y adjoint un troisième, le neutre. Dans cette partie de la thèse, nous dressons le profil des stratégies d’attribution du genre auprès de deux types distincts de bilingues et nous établissons également que le neutre n’est pas le genre par défaut en néerlandais de Belgique.Dans un second temps, nous nous penchons sur l’ordre des constituants. Dans une première étude, nous examinons l’ordre des mots avec « verbe second » (V2) dans l’alternance anglais-néerlandais. Nous abordons ensuite le placement de l’adverbe dans l’alternance anglais- français et anglais-néerlandais. Le chapitre consacré à V2 identifie une lacune dans la littérature générative et tire profit des données de l’al- ternance pour y proposer une solution. Le chapitre consacré à l’adverbe s’intéresse au placement de celui-ci entre le verbe et son objet, position licite en français et néerlandais mais pas en anglais. Dans ces deux études, il apparaît que c’est la langue du verbe à la forme finie qui prédit l’ordre des constituants.L’ensemble des recherches ici réunies démontre que les données bilingues mettent en lumière des aspects de la théorie grammaticale qui restent dans l’ombre lorsque le chercheur se limite à des données monolingues. / Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The creation of word embeddings is one of the key breakthroughs in natural language processing. Word embeddings allow for words to be represented semantically, opening the way to many new deep learning methods. Understanding what information is in word embeddings will help understanding the behaviour of embeddings in natural language processing tasks, but also allows for the quantitative study of the linguistic features such as grammatical gender. This thesis attempts to explore how grammatical gender is encoded in word embeddings, through analysing the performance of a neural network classifier on the classification of nouns by gender. This analysis is done in three experiments: an analysis of contextualized embeddings, an analysis of embeddings learned from modified corpora and an analysis of aligned embeddings in many languages. The contextualized word embedding model ELMo has multiple output layers with a gradual increasing presence of semantic information in the embedding. This differing presence of semantic information was used to test the classifier's reliance on semantic information. Swedish, German, Spanish and Russian embeddings were classified at all layers of a three layered ELMo model. The word representation layer without any contextualization was found to produce the best accuracy, indicating the noise introduced by the contextualization was more impactful than any potential extra semantic information. Swedish embeddings were learned from a corpus stripped of articles and a stemmed corpus. Both sets of embeddings showed an drop of about 6% in accuracy in comparison with the embeddings from a non-augmented corpus, indicating agreement plays a large role in the classification. Aligned multilingual embeddings were used to measure the accuracy of a grammatical gender classifier in 24 languages. The classifier models were applied to data of other languages to determine the similarity of the encoding of grammatical gender in these embeddings. Correcting the results with a random guessing baseline shows that transferred models can be highly accurate in certain language combinations and in some cases almost approach the accuracy of the model on its source data. A comparison between transfer accuracy and phylogenetic distance showed that the model transferability follows a pattern that resembles the phylogenetic distance.

Grammatical gender is a complex classification system and is often referred to as one of the most difficult grammatical categories for second language (L2) speakers to master. Previous research has focused on anticipatory processing of grammatical gender cues in first language (L1) speakers of various gendered languages (French, Spanish, Dutch, etc.) and has found that speakers use gender information from a preceding determiner to facilitate access to a gender-congruent noun (e.g., Dussias et al., 2013; Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010). These findings have been consistently found among speakers of various languages when they were presented with congruent vs. incongruent determiner phrases (DPs), subsequently collapsing across grammatical genders (e.g., congruent: la maison and le bateau vs. incongruent: *le maison vs. *la bateau). Responses to individual genders cues in Spanish has been teased apart (masculine vs. feminine) as well as the effect of inhibitory control on gender processing (Beatty-Martínez, et al., 2020). A correlation between grammatical gender error recovery and increased inhibitory control was found. The current dissertation aims to dissect the processing and underlying neural mechanisms associated with masculine and feminine grammatical gender in L1 French, simultaneous French-English, and L1 English-L2 French speakers. A series of three experiments were conducted. The first two experiments used a masked priming lexical decision task where participants were presented with congruent (e.g., la maison) and incongruent (*le maison) DPs. The first experiment employed a behavioural version of the task and the second experiment focused on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). At a behavioural level, there was no indication of grammatical gender cue use. However, ERP results show that L1 speakers employ distinct processing mechanisms for feminine (P200; *le maison) incongruencies compared to feminine congruencies (la maison). The final experiment consisted of a self-paced reading task, where participants read sentences with congruent and incongruent DPs and an AX-CPT task as a measure of inhibitory control. L1 French and simultaneous French-English speakers exhibit processing difficulties with the incongruent feminine condition (*le maison) compared to the congruent feminine condition (la maison), as well as with the incongruent masculine condition (*la bateau) compared to the congruent masculine condition (le bateau). On the other hand, L2 speakers only show difficulty with the incongruent feminine condition in relation to the congruent feminine condition. Further, there was no relationship between inhibitory control and grammatical gender processing across groups. Overall, the results reflect an intricate picture of grammatical gender processing in French speakers. At a lexical level, L1 French speakers likely process incongruent feminine DPs as a lexical clash, potentially implementing further cognitive resources during processing. At a syntactic level, L1 French and simultaneous French-English speakers show processing difficulties behaviourally to gender incongruencies. L2 speakers seem to employ the use of masculine grammatical gender cues, implying that it is perhaps the presence of a feminine noun causing processing difficulty due to a feature mismatch. These results indicate that masculine and feminine genders employ distinct processing mechanisms and may be accessed in a contrasting manner.

If most scholars tend to agree that the native language of a speaker does influence the way they will understand the reality around them, the question becomes ambiguous when it comes to bilingual speakers’ cognition. How is their reality affected by the combination of their languages? This study aimed at exploring this question under the angle of grammatical gender. Adult simultaneous early bilingualsin French and Swedish were asked, in an innovative experiment, to match a culturally neutral item to a voice. In a second experiment, the same participants were asked to match a culturally loaded item to a voice. In both experiments, items were carefully chosen according to their grammatical gender. Results indicate that grammatical gender was not a predictor of voice assignment. However, the perceived cultural stereotypes of the items used in the second experiment appeared to be a robust predictor of voice assignment. Findings suggest thus that grammatical gender does not affect how simultaneous early bilingualism French and Swedish would conceptualise artifacts, but cultural gender would.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-08-18T11:53:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Daniel de Almeida Leão.pdf: 1416276 bytes, checksum: ba4bc8cff6ad87ee22845be2197eedfb (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-18T11:53:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Daniel de Almeida Leão.pdf: 1416276 bytes, checksum: ba4bc8cff6ad87ee22845be2197eedfb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-28 / This study has as its main goal to investigate the relation between the grammatical system of gender classification for the nouns of the Portuguese language in Brazil and the biological gender of their referents from the perspective of language as a probabilistic system (Halliday, 1991, 1993). More specifically, the investigation extracted the frequencies for the grammatical gender of the nouns (masculine and/or feminine) for the Portuguese language in Brazil and the relation between the grammatical gender and the biological sex of the nouns. For such, this study has as its basis the Corpus Linguistics, a theoretical-scientific methodology which sees the language as a probabilistic system, through the observation of empirical data (Berber Sardinha, 2004). Although the grammatical gender is an aspect of the language approached throughout the grammars of the Portuguese language and its study constantly discussed among scholars and researchers of the field, the great majority of these studies have as basis a traditional perspective of the language, brought by the use of norms (Bechara, 2013). This means that, possibly, there is no other study about this subject which is based on the language in use, in a probabilistic approach (Halliday, 1991, 1993), following the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Berber Sardinha, 2004). In order to accomplish this goal, this work was executed as the following: (i) all the nouns of a corpus (The Brazilian Corpus of Register Variation – CBVR) were extracted; (ii) the nouns were transferred to a database in which they could be classified; (iii) the nouns were classified manually in respect to their grammatical gender and biological gender, following the criteria described in this work’s methodology; (iv) after classifying the nouns, they were accounted according to each of the categories described in the methodology, (v) after that, for each research question, the frequencies were extracted and the probabilities were calculated and; (vi) the research questions were answered based on how the frequencies and probabilities had been revealed. In bringing up the results, it is expected that this research has been able to contribute for offering a new perspective about this subject, one that takes into account the current Portuguese language in Brazil for the 21st century. It is also expected that the methodology designed for the execution of this study could be adapted and applied to several other studies of similar goals, bringing new perspectives for other aspects of the language / O trabalho teve como objetivo principal investigar a relação entre o sistema gramatical de gênero dos substantivos do português Brasil e o gênero biológico de seus referentes a partir da visão da linguagem como sistema probabilístico (Halliday, 1991,1993). Mais especificamente, foi investigada a frequência dos gêneros dos substantivos (masculinos e femininos) na língua portuguesa escrita e falada no Brasil e a relação entre o sistema de gênero gramatical e o gênero biológico dos substantivos. Para tal, o estudo realizado tem como base a Linguística de Corpus, metodologia teórico-científica que vê a língua como sistema probabilístico por meio da observação de dados empíricos (Berber Sardinha, 2004). Embora o gênero gramatical dos substantivos seja um aspecto abordado em todas as gramáticas da língua e seja discutido por acadêmicos e pesquisadores da área constantemente, a grande maioria dos estudos possui base em uma visão tradicional, fixada pelo uso da norma (Bechara, 2013). Isso significa que, possivelmente, não haja estudo acerca do tema que reflete a língua em uso de maneira probabilística (Halliday 1991, 1993), conforme os pressupostos da Linguística de Corpus (Berber Sardinha, 2004).Para a consecução desse objetivo, a pesquisa se sucedeu da seguinte maneira: (i) foram extraídos todos os substantivos de um corpus (o Corpus Brasileiro de Variação de Registros - CBVR); (ii) os substantivos foram transferidos para uma base de dados sob a qual puderam ser classificados; (iii) foi feita a classificação manual de cada um dos substantivos quanto ao gênero gramatical e gênero biológico, seguindo os critérios descritos na metodologia deste trabalho; (iv) ao final da classificação, foi feita contagem de quantos substantivos foram classificados para cada uma as categorias descritas; (v) foram extraídas as frequências e calculadas as probabilidades para cada uma das perguntas de pesquisa e; (vi) as perguntas foram respondidas com base nas frequências e probabilidades reveladas. Ao trazer os resultados, espera-se que esta pesquisa tenha contribuído para oferecer uma nova perspectiva acerca do tema, uma que leve em consideração o português do Brasil em uso corrente no século XXI. Espera-se também que a metodologia desenhada para a execução deste estudo possa ser adaptada e aplicada em diversos outros de cunho similar, trazendo novas perspectivas para outros aspectos da língua