La casa – dom – el dom or la dom? A Pilot Study on Grammatical Gender in Spanish-Polish Bilingual Children

This thesis presents the findings of a pilot study investigating the language production of Spanish-Polish children. These participants are heritage speakers of Spanish, with Polish being the majority language in their environment. This language contact situation between Spanish and Polish, leads to code-switching (CS), a phenomenon defined by Deuchar (2012) as “code-switching is an activity which may be observed in the speech (or writing) of bilinguals who go back and forth between their two languages in the same conversation”. The first aim of the present study is to investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender in Spanish and Polish within the noun phrase (NP), to understand to what extent the children acquired both gender systems. The second goal is to examine gender assignment within mixed nominal constructions, including determiners in Spanish and nouns in Polish. This analysis considers the structural differences between two languages: Spanish, which has a binary ...Show moreThis thesis presents the findings of a pilot study investigating the language production of Spanish-Polish children. These participants are heritage speakers of Spanish, with Polish being the majority language in their environment. This language contact situation between Spanish and Polish, leads to code-switching (CS), a phenomenon defined by Deuchar (2012) as “code-switching is an activity which may be observed in the speech (or writing) of bilinguals who go back and forth between their two languages in the same conversation”. The first aim of the present study is to investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender in Spanish and Polish within the noun phrase (NP), to understand to what extent the children acquired both gender systems. The second goal is to examine gender assignment within mixed nominal constructions, including determiners in Spanish and nouns in Polish. This analysis considers the structural differences between two languages: Spanish, which has a binary (masculine/feminine) gender system, and Polish, which features a three-way gender system (masculine/feminine/neuter). Another key focus of this study is evaluating effectiveness of the research design, particularly the success rate in collecting valid responses. Additionally, the study explores how the choice of stimuli and other contextual factors, such as linguistic background of the participants, may have influenced the results. Based on the literature on the acquisition of two gender systems by bilinguals, and considering previous findings on gender assignment in mixed nominal constructions, the following research questions were formulated: (1) To what extent have the Spanish-Polish bilingual children acquired the Polish and Spanish gender systems? (2) What are the gender assignment strategies within mixed determiner phrases (DPs) used by Spanish-Polish bilingual children? (3) Do the Spanish-Polish bilingual children show a clear preference for one gender assignment strategy over the other(s)? For the purpose of this study, the Director-Matcher Task (Gullberg et al., 2009) was conducted in two monolingual modes and one mixing mode. The monolingual modes were carried out to investigate to what extent each participant acquired gender system in Polish and Spanish, while the mixing mode examined gender assignment within mixed DPs. In the Polish mode, the implementation of the adjectives was the easiest way to obtain information about the acquired gender of the noun, since in Polish determiners are not used. Thereby, for the Spanish mode - the monolingual DPs were elicited, and for the Polish mode - the monolingual NPs were obtained. A total of fifteen Spanish-Polish bilingual children were examined across four cities in Poland. Additionally, parental and children’s questionnaires were used as supplementary research method. The results of the monolingual modes show that simultaneous bilinguals were more accurate in acquiring Polish grammatical gender than Spanish, while the sequential bilinguals performed better in Spanish. In the mixing mode, some CS strategies were identifiable. It also revealed that for some of the participants CS felt rather unnatural, thereby they produced fewer mixed DPs. However, given the small sample size and exploratory nature of this pilot study, it was difficult to draw definitive conclusions. Nevertheless, the findings provide a foundation and suggest refining the methodology for future research in exploring bilingualism among Spanish-Polish bilingual children.Show less

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La casa – dom – el dom or la dom? A Pilot Study on Grammatical Gender in Spanish-Polish Bilingual Children