Abstract
Research on grammatical gender processing has generally assumed that grammatical gender can be treated as a uniform construct, resulting in a body of literature in which different gender classes are collapsed into single analysis. The present work reviews linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic research on grammatical gender from different methodologies and across different profiles of Spanish speakers. Specifically, we examine distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, the resulting biases in gender assignment, and the consequences of these assignment strategies on gender expectancy and processing. We discuss the implications of the findings for the design of future gender processing studies and, more broadly, for our understanding of the potential differences in the processing reflexes of grammatical gender classes within and across languages.
Highlights
IntroductionOf relevance for the work presented here, studies examining grammatical gender provide evidence that information at one point in a sentence is used to anticipate other information downstream
Linguistic factors have long been known to modulate word identification
We propose that codeswitching provides a special testbed for the study of distributional asymmetries in gender assignment while circumventing some of the obstacles outlined above (MyersScotton and Jake, 2015)
Summary
Of relevance for the work presented here, studies examining grammatical gender provide evidence that information at one point in a sentence is used to anticipate other information downstream. Grammatical gender is a widespread feature in many of the world languages. Put, it refers to “classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words” Linguists agree that a language is said to have a grammatical gender system if there is evidence for gender outside the nouns themselves. One such type of evidence is gender agreement (Corbett, 1991).
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