The performance of Icelandic-speaking children on the comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender was investigated. Eighty children ranging in age from 4-8 years were tested. It was hypothesized that if children rely primarily on formal information for determing grammatical gender, they should perform equally well on both natural and syntactic gender and on both familiar and unfamiliar words when equivalent formal information is available. The results failed to replicate an earlier study of German-speaking children and failed to confirm the hypotheses. The children's performance was significantly better on natural gender than on syntactic gender, and on familiar syntactic gender as opposed to unfamiliar syntactic gender. The results also indicate that formal information about noun gender alone was not useful to Icelandic children in assigning gender to nonsense words before the age of 7 years. The contradictory results in relation to the German study are attributed to differences between the noun endings and developmental patterns for gender of the two languages. (RW)