A task to assess grammatical gender representation in preschool Italian children

The aim of the current work is propose validation and standardization of the task devised by Belacchi and Cubelli (2012) to evaluate implicit grammatical gender representation in Italian preschool children, since no specific assessments are available.The assessment is composed by 64 photos of animals whose name has different formal indexes, representatives of Italian names' grammatical gender: referential (sexed exemplar); epicenes with different indexes (phonological-i.e., ending; syntactic-i.e., determiner; phonological + syntactic-i.e., ending + determiner). Norms have been obtained for specific age ranges (3 to 5 years) that allow to detect both typical and atypical language development.