Chapter 12. Explaining gender

This work examines the knowledge of grammatical gender by bilingual speakers for whom Spanish is the weaker language in the dyad, that is, heritage speakers of Spanish. In modeling heritage speakers’ knowledge and use of grammatical gender, we distinguish between gender assignment (how nouns get associated with specific genders) and gender agreement (the process by which features of a noun get shared by other sentential constituents). We show that divergent instances of gender assignment constitute the use of a default strategy; with masculine as the default class in Spanish, the absence of gender assignment surfaces as masculine morphology. We also review evidence suggesting that heritage speakers differ from the baseline in relying on surface gender cues more categorically. To explain the intricacies of divergent agreement behavior, we argue for genuine representational difference between how baseline and heritage speakers represent gender (and number) features. Taken together, these observations indicate that heritage speakers are sensitive to cues for gender assignment despite the decreased input they receive compared to baseline speakers; their assignment strategies then translate into the observed patterns of agreement, which as a syntactic phenomenon is alive and well in the heritage grammar. We use our results to highlight the utility of non-lexicalist approaches to the representation of gender.