Two gender systems in one mind

This study investigates the simultaneous acquisition of two different grammatical gender systems by Norwegian-Russian children. The main difference between the two languages is transparency of gender assignment: Gender is relatively predictable in Russian, while it is more or less idiosyncratic in Norwegian. We also focus on the effect of parental input in terms of one or two Russian-speaking parents. Semi-spontaneous production data from twelve bilingual children are compared to data from nine Norwegian and fourteen Russian monolingual children. The comparison reveals that both transparency and the amount of parental input in the minority language have an effect on the acquisition of grammatical gender.