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Natural gender, phonological cues and the default grammatical gender in French children

According to a dominant thesis, nominal endings are the privileged cues French children use to determine new nouns’ gender subclass. Children will rely on phonology even in cases of discordance with natural gender. Two elicited production studies involving more than 250 4- to 17-year-olds showed that while French children did not base their gender attribution choices on natural gender, they did not base them on phonology either: the masculine was the dominant choice. These results thus provide additional support to the ‘masculine as default’ view of French nouns’ gender acquisition proposed by the authors in an earlier study. The present article considers how the developmental conditions of children’s initial computations might bias their tallies towards a higher type frequency for masculine nouns, which could contribute to launching this gender as the default.