We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues compared to other languages, and children have been argued to acquire semantic and phonological rules in tandem. German–Russian bilingual children face the challenge of acquiring two different gender assignment systems simultaneously. We tested 45 bilingual children (ages 4–10 years) and monolingual controls. Results show that the children are clearly sensitive to phonological cues, while semantic cues play a minor role. However, monolingual and bilingual children have different defaulting strategies, with monolinguals defaulting to neuter and bilinguals to feminine gender.

我们调查了德俄双语儿童在为德语名词分配性别时对形式和语义线索的敏感性。在各种语言中，幼儿已被证明主要依赖语音提示，而对语义和句法提示的敏感性随着年龄的增长而增加。凭借其半透明的性别分配系统，形式和语义线索都与心理语言相关，德语与其他语言相比语音线索较弱，并且儿童被认为要同时获得语义和语音规则。德俄双语儿童面临同时获得两种不同性别分配系统的挑战。我们测试了 45 名双语儿童（4-10 岁）和单语对照。结果表明，孩子们对语音提示明显敏感，而语义线索则起次要作用。然而，单语和双语儿童有不同的默认策略，单语默认为中性，双语默认为女性。