Are there differences between girls and boys in first language acquisition?...

Abstract

This study investigates the biological gender differences (girls and boys) in the monolingual acquisition of dative alternation (DA) constructions in Spanish (dative clitic doubled [DCLD] structures and a/para-datives). We expect that girls show an earlier emergence, and a higher incidence, in the production of Spanish DA, when compared to boys’ data (Cornett 2014 and Lovas 2011), regardless of the syntactic relationship between the two DA structures. We also examine the role played by adult input in monolingual girls’ and in monolingual boys’ production of Spanish DA constructions. In order to shed light on these issues, we analyze spontaneous production data from six girls and three boys, and the adults that interact with them, as available in CHILDES (MacWhinney
2000). Our findings reveal that monolingual girls and monolingual boys exhibit analogous patterns in the acquisition of the syntactic non-derivational relationship between DCLD and a/para-datives, as seen in their similar emergence at around the age of 2. Biological gender differences are not reflected either in the lower incidence of a/para-datives, which suggests that these patterns could be explained by the frequency of exposure to these structures in the adult input.