Annie Gagliardi, Jeffrey Lidz. (2014). Statistical Insensitivity in the Acquisition of Tsez Noun Classes. Language. PDF.

Annie Gagliardi. Source: University of Maryland

This article looks “at the acquisition of noun classes, a problem that allows us to differentiate between the input, or the information available to a learner in the environment, and the intake, the information that a learner makes use of in constructing a grammar” . . . “In the acquisition of Tsez noun classes we find that input and intake do differ. While Tsez-acquiring children appear to make use of both noun-external and noun-internal distributional information, their use of noun-internal distributional information is selective. Instead of using semantic cues, which both adults and statistical models find to be the most reliable information, children use less reliable phonological information.”

Oxford Bibliographies: Classifiers and noun classes (Alexandra Aikhenvald). Gender (Jenny Audring). The Tsez language.
ScienceDaily: Sound trumps meaning in first language learning.