I am very pleased to announce that Assignment of Grammatical Gender in Heritage Greek is now available on Frontiers in Psychology — Language Sciences.

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 Varlokosta (2005) was employed to assess the role of morphological and semantic cues when it comes to gender assignment for real and novel nouns. Ralli’s (1994) inflectional classes for Greek nouns and Anastasiadi-Symeonidi and Cheila-Markopoulou’s (2003) 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 (Varlokosta, 2011). 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.

Karayiannis D, Kambanaros M, Grohmann KK and Alexiadou A (2021) Assignment of Grammatical Gender in Heritage Greek. Front. Psychol. 12:717449. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717449 [PDF] [EPUB]

Let me know what you think about this via email.

Tags: heritage linguistics, Greek, gender