French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition.

In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French-learning toddlers use gender-marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split-screen preferential looking experiment, 25-month-olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns with either the same or different genders. The target word in the auditory instruction was preceded either by the correct or incorrect gender-marked definite article. Toddlers' looking times to target shortly after article onset demonstrated that target words were processed most efficiently in different-gender grammatical trials. While target processing in same-gender grammatical trials recovered in the subsequent time window, ungrammatical articles continued to affect processing efficiency until much later in the trial. These results indicate that by 25 months of age, French-learning toddlers use gender information on determiners when comprehending subsequent nouns.