How long did it take for your kids to figure out gender?

[mambera]

Just curious.  We've got a triple-language situation where DH and I each speak a different language to DD (but English to each other) and she gets English at day care.

Right now DD (she just turned two) hasn't got a clue about gender.  She assigns gendered articles randomly to her nouns, with the expected 33% success rate (we have masc/fem/neuter). 

I'm just curious about the age range when kids typically figure this out, especially kids who are learning a gendered community language.  Obviously hearing a language from only one parent really limits the range of the exposure.  Btw I don't correct anything she says, nor do I ignore requests in languages other than my L2 (although I translate whatever she said into my L2 before I respond).

I posted a while ago about pronouns and since then she's got them totally figured out in English (loves to let us know about which things are "Mine!!") but still thinks 'you' means 'DD' and 'I' means 'Mom/Dad' in both of the home languages (so I know what she really means when she yells "Yours!" in my L2, heh). 

TIA for the input - I know I probably sound kind of neurotic about the language thing but it's not really worry, more just fascination with the learning process and curiosity about how it is going to develop.

[transylvania_mom]

Ds is 6 and still mixes them up sometimes. He knows them well, and understands the correct use but he sometimes doesn't care.

We speak language 1 at home, he's in school full time in language 2 and we are in a language 3 community (English). Our experience was that if we respond to requests in language 3, ds would stop using L1 completely. When he was around 4 y/o he forgot how to speak L1 for about a year, although we, parents, were using only L1 at home with him and each other. Fortunately his grandma (L1 only) stayed with us for 6 months, and he had to relearn L1 so he could communicate with her.

[IsaFrench]

transylvania_mom, thanks for posting about your experience, my son forgot L1 at about the same age as we had moved to another country and I thought there was something missing in his brain that made him unnable to keep up with two languages at the same time .... basically anything I learn about this subject makes me feel better (felt un-prepared and not sure I handled it best ...)

not sure about pronouns but DD2, when about 3 years old got to think that "second" actually meant "first" so we had some tense moments when all 3 kids were working out who was going to walk/ and in which order, on top of a small wall nearby the library ... took a few months until that language point was settled ...

[transylvania_mom]

Originally Posted by IsaFrench 

transylvania_mom, thanks for posting about your experience, my son forgot L1 at about the same age as we had moved to another country and I thought there was something missing in his brain that made him unnable to keep up with two languages at the same time .... basically anything I learn about this subject makes me feel better (felt un-prepared and not sure I handled it best ...)

I think it's normal and requires less effort for the child to use only the language he uses at school / daycare. We used to live in a multicultural community (at one point we had friends in the African and Serbian communities; one family was Latin and Chinese, another one African and German). I thought the parents were mean, if they refused to speak or respond to their kids' requests in English. But I found this was the only way of preserving L1. Rephrasing, correcting etc. don't work.

Just my experience.

[mambera]

So this thread is going in a bit of a different direction than I had originally intended (and if people want to weigh in about their kids' developing use of gender I would still love to hear about that) but I also want to talk a little bit about refusal-to-respond and all that stuff.

So I actually think that the degree to which this type of thing is necessary is very highly dependent on the individual child and his/her innate capacity and interest in language acquisition.

I am actually the product of a bilingual home in which only one parent (my dad) routinely used the minority language with us.  He never ignored stuff we were saying in the majority language (English except for summers and a short stint when we lived in the motherland), and yeah there was a whole lot of us speaking English while he spoke L2.  I am fluent and literate in L2 although English is still my dominant (which is to be expected since almost all of my education has been in the US).

I also know a whole slew of children from bilingual homes who as adults range from bare comprehension to total fluency in their L2.  None of them came from homes in which parents ignored things the children said in the majority language.  (The biggest factor as far as I can see was time spent in the home country, of course, effectively reversing the majority/minority language status for periods of time.)

I expect that ignoring/refusing to acknowlege English may be something that I will need to do in the future, but I see no reason to start now since DD is only two years old, she makes full sentences in all three of her languages, and I really can't predict where her language development will be in a few years.  I'm open to doing that if it becomes important but right now I'd rather encourage the concept of actually using words (versus screaming and whining) rather than get picky about which language the words are coming in.

[IsaFrench]

am quite in agreement with you.

DS has totally different capacities & interest in language than DD1 (who is older) + we moved at a different time for them (they are 2 years appart) which was not so good for him (he was in the middle of struggling with L1 already ...) so end result is going to be largely dependant on that factor.

about refusing to respond in the majority language in order to ensure more fluency in L2 ... that's not something that came to my mind at that time or that I was comfortable with once I got the concept ...

so sometimes I wonder; if I had done it, would the outcome have been so different later on ?

i am not convinced overall .... some children can be very stuborn so it may be just that they want to do only what they have decided for themselves and not what is imposed by external forces ..or just lazyness maybe for some or just a slight lack of verbal ability which makes the task seems really daunting and much harder than it would be for another child who would have a different level of developpment at the same age ....

I like to read posts on this subject from someone who explains what they are doing and why they are doing it ....

It's a change from all we heard (unsollicited) before our children were even born ... by people who had no practical experience on the subject either ...

[transylvania_mom]

Originally Posted by mambera 

So this thread is going in a bit of a different direction than I had originally intended (and if people want to weigh in about their kids' developing use of gender I would still love to hear about that) but I also want to talk a little bit about refusal-to-respond and all that stuff.

So I actually think that the degree to which this type of thing is necessary is very highly dependent on the individual child and his/her innate capacity and interest in language acquisition.

Sorry about it, I didn't mean to derail the thread.