Acquisition of the natural-gender rule in English and German

Arguments have been presented both for the hypothesis that children use semantic notions as a basis for acquisition and for the hypothesis that they mil first learn formal rules. Data were collected from English and German threeand four-year-olds in the area of gender which show that despite the same cognitive notion the gender-marking forms are acquired quite differently in the two languages. English children are later in their acquisition than German. Relevant factors are the extent of the gender system, the phonetic shape of the forms, and the task the child is engaged in: production or comprehension. These results show that the course of acquisition is linked closely to the structural properties of the language concerned and that children can use both semantic and structural properties depending on their clarity in the system.