The role of gender in language acquisition

As has been noted above, the semantic rule of gender marking is based on sex distinction. In Lithuanian, the two classes of nouns – ‘persons’ and ‘animals’ – can exhibit two patterns of gender marking based on the biological category ‘sex’,

namely, by different roots (lexical) and by affixes (derivational). No difficulties in using this type of nouns were noted in Rūta’s speech. The girl is perfectly able to distinguish the referent she needs in the pair of masculine/feminine nouns, which are marked by different roots and different inflections.