Abstract
When considering the acquisition of an area in a language, the formal properties of the system are clearly of relevance in making predicitions about the order and speed of learning. Part of the linguistic background for the child is however not only the formal properties of the area, but how other speakers behave with respect to those properties. The psycholinguistic evidence on the productivity of a rule, for example, shows that the rule has a different status in the input for the child, which must be considered in describing acquisition. This chapter presents what is known about adults’ behaviour with respect to gender; this information is then related to questions of acquisition.
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Mills, A.E. (1986). Rules and Speakers’ Behaviour. In: The Acquisition of Gender. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 20. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71362-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71362-0_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-71364-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-71362-0
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