Abstract

This article investigates the effect of age of first exposure and the quantity and quality of input to which non-native acquirers (L2ers) are exposed in their acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Data from 103 English-speaking children, preteens and adults were analysed for gender agreement on definite determiners. It was observed that although most learners regularly overgeneralized the common gender definite determiner de to neuter nouns, there also existed child and adult L2ers who consistently produced the target neuter determiner het with these nouns (contra Carroll, 1989;