Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh: An alternative to rule-based learning

Abstract

This paper examines Welsh-speaking children's productive command of mutation — a set of morphophonological changes, conditioned by lexical and syntactic environments, that affect the initial consonants of words. In Welsh, grammatical gender is marked by mutations, and the mapping between mutation and gender is opaque. Using a Cloze-type procedure, Experiment 1 presented children between the ages of 4 1 /2 and 9 years with a distant gender-marked context, and Experiments 2 and 3 presented similar-aged children with triggering contexts for mutation that were not conditioned by gender. Results suggest that children's ability to mark gender categories is not limited by their underlying knowledge of the mutation system in general, but the course of development is protracted and complex.