Comparison of Grammatical Gender Processing Ability in Three Age Groups of Persian-Speaking Children

A wide range of studies in various languages has examined the nature and developmental trajectory of concepts in children over recent decades, including the concept of "grammatical gender." Research by Gelman and Raman (2003), Rhodes et al. (2018), and Puschel et al. (2023) has shown that proficiency in understanding and producing gender-marked nouns increases in tandem with the development of linguistic and cognitive abilities, as well as category-based reasoning in children. The aim of this study is to investigate the ability to process noun gender and compare its developmental pattern in Persian-speaking children. Three tests were administered to 24 children in three age groups: 3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 years old.



In the first test, morphological-contextual cues were used to identify noun gender; in the second and third tests, morphological and syntactic cues within sentences were employed, respectively. The findings from statistical analyses showed that 3-4-year-old children could to some extent identify noun gender in all three tests; however, 4-5-year-old children performed significantly better than them. On the other hand, the performance of the 5-6-year-old age group in processing noun gender was better than that of the 4-5-year-old group, but this difference was not significant. Therefore, it can be concluded that the skill of processing noun gender in children is a gradual process that improves alongside the growth of their linguistic and world knowledge.

Another finding of the study was that processing morphological cues, compared to syntactic and morphological-contextual cues as indicators of noun gender, was more challenging for Persian-speaking children.