Bilingual acquisition of gender and gender agreement.

The scope of this thesis is grammatical gender. It investigates the speech of three children raised bilingually in two Indo-European languages, Polish and English, and presents a plethora of aspects that need to be taken into account when studying the acquisition of gender by children. Acquisition of two languages simultaneously is a complex process and has been studied by scholars from many different perspectives. This study investigates only one element of the children's linguistic system, but does it with care and in detail. First, the nature and function of gender in Polish and English are discussed; second, a review of studies dealing with acquisition of grammatical gender in different languages is provided, and accompanied by short debate on language development theories. Next, the reader is presented with details on the methodology implemented for this project, i.e. recruitment procedures, data collection process, coding techniques and more. This is followed by the data analysis, which is focused on two areas: Polish noun phrases and Polish-English mixed noun phrases. Finally, the thesis is concluded with a list of findings and ideas for future research