Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues...

5 A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is 6 that they never express nonconservative relations. To account for this one might hy7 pothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited 8 to nonconservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 9 fourand five-year-olds fail to learn a novel nonconservative det...

A main question in current research on early language development is when and how children acquire the grammatical categories of the language they are learning. The present study investigates the development of the noun grammatical category in French by analysing children’s naturalistic productions from three age groups, i.e., 1;8, 2;6 and 3;3. In oral French, the noun class is mainly character...