The Influence of Gender on the Acquisition of Olutachoni Lexicon

Abstract

Language acquisition is a complex process which involves several variables such as age, gender, social class, ethnicity among others. These variables have been extensively studied in relation to language learning. The aim of this paper is to investigate if gender has an influence on the acquisition of Olutachoni lexicon in terms of lexical borrowing. Lexical acquisition among children has been manifested through lexical borrowing. Lexical importation and lexical invention are strategies employed under lexical borrowing by the learners during first language acquisition. A total of twelve children, six females and six males aged between 2-7 years participated in the study. Data was collected from children in mixed and single language family set ups. The study adopted the ethnographic approach to collect and record utterances. A contrastive and comparative analysis of the cases of lexical borrowing in relation to the gender of the children was done. Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient was used to test the relationship between lexical borrowing and gender and the significant difference between them. The results were presented through frequency tables and diagrams followed with explanations.  The findings showed that there was a significant gender difference in the use of lexical borrowing strategies among male and female children. Male children had a tendency to use lexical borrowing language learning strategies more often than female learners.