Dr. Marit Westergaard presents. In this talk I will present corpus and experimental data on the acquisition of grammatical gender in Norwegian, from monolinguals and two groups of bilingual children, Norwegian-English and Norwegian-Russian. Norwegian has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, and gender is visible as agreement within the DP as well as on suffixes on the noun itself (the bound definite article and plurals). Furthermore, gender assignment is generally non-transparent, making frequency a considerable factor in acquisition. The results of our studies show that the suffixes are in place from early on, while there is massive overgeneralization of masculine in the forms expressing agreement. Contrary to our prediction that the neuter would be the most vulnerable gender (due to low frequency), it turns out that the children hardly produce feminine gender at all, even at age 6. There are only minor differences between the monolinguals and the bilinguals. Our results indicate that the language is undergoing a change from a three-gender system to a two-gender system (common and neuter) and that the suffixes should be analyzed as markers of declension class rather than gender.  All are welcome.