Variation in the input: child and caregiver in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian

• In Russian masculine profession titles and female names ending in -ok/-ik show variable agreement.
• The nouns occur highly infrequently in the input to preschool children.
• Child and caregiver use of semantic agreement was investigated experimentally.
• Unlike the adult speakers, preschool children use feminine agreement very infrequently.
• A combination of factors is suggested to be responsible for the detected difference.

This paper investigates gender agreement with two classes of Russian nouns, masculine profession titles and female names that end in -ok/-ik. The focus of the paper is on how children and adults use semantic agreement with these nouns and how the variable forms are distributed in their production. In naturalistic production these nouns are virtually absent as evidenced by the corpus data of one monolingual Russian child and her mother. The results of a semi-spontaneous production task with 25 monolingual 2–3-year-olds and their primary caregivers reveal that children strongly prefer masculine agreement and the adults, feminine agreement. At the age of 5–6, however, semantic agreement becomes a preferred alternative, but only with female names. The results of the study are discussed with regard to the issues that were raised in previous research on the acquisition of language-internal variation, such as social awareness, input frequency, complexity, and child’s age.