Wisdom comes with age? The role of grammatical gender in predictive processing in Russian children and adults

This study investigated whether adult and 3- to 6-year-old native speakers of Russian can use gender-marked adjectives to predict the upcoming noun during sentence comprehension. In a visual world paradigm, participants heard questions (e.g., Gde horosij sinij ezik? "Where is the nice(masc) blue(masc) hedgehog(masc)?") including two gender-marked adjectives and a noun while seeing pictures of a target and a distractor of either the same (e.g., ezik "hedgehogmasc," miska "bear(masc)") or different gender (e.g., ezik "hedgehog(masc)," sobacka "dog(fem)") on the screen. We examined whether participants could use gender-marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun). Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses revealed that both adults and children anticipated the upcoming noun before its onset. The magnitude of the anticipation effect was stronger for adults than children. Subsequent analyses on the child data did not show evidence that age modulated their anticipation ability. The results of this study extend and improve knowledge regarding the role of adjectives that carry a grammatical gender cue in online sentence processing.