The acquisition of gender and the development of derivational morphology in child L2 Greek

We investigate the relationship between the acquisition of gender and derivational morphology in 124 Turkish L1 child acquirers of Greek (mean age: 13.6). Three oral elicitation tasks are used: a gender assignment task, a gender agreement task and a derivational morphology task. Results reveal that the nonnative speakers (NNS) lag behind their monolingual peers on all tasks, but have extremely low scores on the derivational morphology task. Interestingly, the correlation between their performance on the gender agreement and the derivational morphology task is higher than on the other two cases, suggesting that the NNS might be relying more on their explicit knowledge on the gender assignment task