Abstract
Like many other languages, German employs a linguistic category called “grammatical gender.” In gender-marking languages each noun is assigned to a particular gender-class (in German: masculine, feminine or neuter) and other words in a sentence which are grammatically controlled by the noun are marked by particular morphemes according to the noun’s gender feature – so called gender agreement. Within psycholinguistic theories of language comprehension, it is often assumed that gender agreement might help to predict the continuation of a sentence on grammatical grounds and to reduce the lexical search space for the next words emerging within the speech signal. Thus, gender agreement relations may provide a means to make the comprehension process more effective and targeted. The aim of the current study was to assess whether monolingual German 3rd and 4th grade primary school children make use of gender agreement in online auditory comprehension and whether different gender cues interact with each other and with semantic information. A language-picture matching task was conducted in which 32 children looked at two pictures while listening to a noun phrase. Due to features of the German gender system, the target picture corresponding with the noun phrase could be predicted shortly after stimulus onset on account of gender agreement relations. The predictive impact of grammatical gender agreement on noun-phrase decoding was investigated by measuring the time course of eye-movements onto the target and distractor pictures. The results confirm and extend previous findings that gender plays a role in predictive online comprehension of gender-marking languages like German, and that even primary school children are able to make use of this grammatical device.
Highlights
Speed and effectiveness of information processing in spoken language comprehension has attracted much attention in psycholinguistic research and is emphasized as representing a remarkable ability in adults and typically developing children (e.g., Friederici, 2002; Treiman et al, 2003; Borovsky et al, 2013)
The results of the present study confirm findings observed for children from other gender-marking languages (Lew-Williams and Fernald, 2007; Melançon and Shi, 2013; Brouwer et al, 2017), for German speaking adults (Hopp, 2013; Hopp and Lemmerth, 2016) as well as for monolingual German speaking primary school children (Lemmerth and Hopp, 2017)
It could be shown that German 3rd and 4th graders use gender information in order to predict the noun according to its agreement with preceding gender marked words
Summary
Speed and effectiveness of information processing in spoken language comprehension has attracted much attention in psycholinguistic research and is emphasized as representing a remarkable ability in adults and typically developing children (e.g., Friederici, 2002; Treiman et al, 2003; Borovsky et al, 2013). Successful comprehension depends on the listeners’ ability to rapidly analyze and integrate linguistic information from different domains (e.g., phonological, semantic, morphosyntactic), while the sentence unfolds with a rate of approximately three syllables per second (Montgomery, 2005). In order to keep pace with the rapidly incoming and decaying acoustic signal listeners should predict probable continuations of a sentence or phrase as soon as possible and these probabilistic predictions have to be updated permanently as soon as new linguistic information reaches the decoding system (e.g., Federmeier, 2007; Jaeger and Snider, 2013; Pickering and Garrod, 2013).
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