Gender Of Nouns Research Articles

Processing definitional and stereotypical gender in reference resolution: Evidence from eye-movements

Readers immediately slow down when an anaphor (e.g. herself) refers to an antecedent that mismatches in stereotypical gender (e.g. minister). The mismatch-cost has been attributed to a clash between the gender of the pronoun and the gender associated with the stereotypical role noun. However, the nature of such stereotypical gender is still controversial; according to the mental models approach it is inferred from world knowledge, while according to a lexical view it is stored as part of the lexical representation. We report two eye-tracking experiments designed to investigate the processing of stereotypical gender. In these experiments stereotypical nouns (e.g. minister) are contrasted with definitional nouns (e.g. king) in which gender information is part of the definition of the word. Experiment 1 shows that in anaphora sentences, where the role noun is presented earlier than the reflexive that conveys gender information, stereotypical and definitional gender nouns lead to a similar mismatch-cost. Experiment 2 shows that in cataphora sentences, where the reflexive precedes the stereotypical noun, a mismatch-cost is exhibited only for definitional gender nouns. These results indicate that stereotypical gender can be overridden when gender is specified by prior discourse, unlike lexically defined gender. We discuss the differences between these noun types and their implications for the representation and processing of stereotypical gender.

Bilingualism and thought: Grammatical gender and concepts of objects in Italian-German bilingual children

This paper investigates whether bilinguals' and monolinguals' concepts of entities differ when the bilinguals' two languages provide two different representations of the same entity. Previous research shows that speakers of languages that have a grammatical gender system think of objects as being masculine or feminine in line with the grammatical gender of the objects' nouns. The present study investigates the effects of grammatical gender on concepts of objects in bilingual speakers of two languages that assign opposite gender to the same object. Italian-German bilingual children and Italian monolingual controls performed an on-line voice attribution task. All children were native speakers of Italian and living in Italy. Results show that Italian monolingual children attribute more female voices to objects whose noun is grammatically feminine in Italian. Monolinguals also show a preference for attributing voices consistently with Italian grammatical gender assignment. Italian-German bilingual children are not affected by Italian grammatical gender. It is argued that when the two languages of a bilingual represent a specific aspect of reality differently, the bilingual may develop different concepts from a monolingual. This is due to the knowledge of two specific languages rather than to bilingualism per se, and to linguistic rather than cultural factors.

The acquisition of gender marking by young German-speaking children: Evidence for learning guided by phonological regularities

The acquisition of noun gender on articles was studied in a sample of 21 young German-speaking children. Longitudinal spontaneous speech data were used. Data analysis is based on 22 two-hourly speech samples per child from 6 children between 1;4 and 3;8 and on 5 two-hourly speech samples per child from 15 children between 1;4 and 1;10. The use of gender marked articles occurred from 1;5. Error frequencies dropped below 1o% by 3;0. Definite and indefinite articles were used with similar frequencies and error rates did not differ in the two paradigms. Children's errors were systematic. For monosyllabic nouns and for polysyllabic nouns ending in -el, -en and -er errors were more frequent for nouns which did not conform to the rule that such nouns tend to be masculine. Furthermore, children erred in the direction of the rule overgeneralizing der. Correct gender marking was also associated with adult frequency of noun use. The present data is evidence for the early use of phonological regularities of noun structure in the acquisition of gender marking.

Prevzete besede iz latinščine. Latinski samostalniki, ki so postali slovenski samostalniki

Latinski samostalniki, ki so postali slovenski samostalniki Izvleček Pričujoči članek predstavlja latinske samostalnike, ki so ob prevzetju v slovenščino ohranili svojo besednovrstno pripadnost, in poskus njihovega razporejanja po oblikoslovnih kategorijah. Pri tem opozarja predvsem na vlogo, ki sta jo pri prevzemanju latinskih prvin imeli francoščina in nemščina, na jezikovno zmožnost prevzemalcev ter na nekaj zanimivih primerov, ko je izid prevzemanja v slovenščino drugačen od pričakovanega.

Un nase or una nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty

In his model of the architecture of the bilingual mind, MacSwan (1999, 2000) proposes to allow all kinds of code-switching as long as the grammars of the two languages involved are respected. Following this approach, we claim that mixed DPs uttered by bilingual children are well-formed. Particularly, we think that the analysis of gender assignment in mixed DPs will shed light on how the two lexicons of bilinguals interact. Looking at spontaneous speech from Italian/German children (age 1; 8–5), we predict that the gender of the noun will be switched together with the noun. As a consequence, the gender encoded on the determiner will correspond to the noun's gender although the determiner is from the other language and the equivalent noun in that language may have a different gender. We argue that this occurs because gender is an abstract lexical feature of nouns which is stored in the lexicon and thus reject the view that gender is a functional head in syntax. Further, we will discuss recent neuro-linguistic results which concern gender representation and relate these to our findings on gender selection in bilingual children's mixed DPs.

Constraints on probability distributions of grammatical forms

In this study we investigate the constraints on probability distribution of grammatical forms within morphological paradigms of Serbian language, where paradigm is specified as a coherent set of elements with defined criteria for inclusion. Thus, for example, in Serbian all feminine nouns that end with the suffix "a" in their nominative singular form belong to the third declension, the declension being a paradigm. The notion of a paradigm could be extended to other criteria as well, hence, we can think of noun cases, irrespective of grammatical number and gender, or noun gender, irrespective of case and grammatical number, also as paradigms. We took the relative entropy as a measure of homogeneity of probability distribution within paradigms. The analysis was performed on 116 morphological paradigms of typical Serbian and for each paradigm the relative entropy has been calculated. The obtained results indicate that for most paradigms the relative entropy values fall within a range of 0.75 - 0.9. Nonhomogeneous distribution of relative entropy values allows for estimating the relative entropy of the morphological system as a whole. This value is 0.69 and can tentatively be taken as an index of stability of the morphological system.

The role of a child’s gender in language acquisition

The aim of the present article is to examine the relationship between the process of language acquisition and gender. It analyzes a longitudinal corpus of one girl, Rūta, covering the period from 1;7 to 2;6. The corpus consists of 35 hours of recordings. The recorded speech is transcribed according to the requirements of CHILDES (MacWhinney, Snow 1990). A special attention in the article is paid to testing the hypothesis which was supported by empirical evidence from other languages to the effect that the unmarked member, i.e. nouns of masculine gender, is acquired earlier than the marked member of the opposition (i.e. feminine nouns). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5128/ERYa3.19

Gender Semiotics, Anglo-Frisian , and Old Frisian Noun Gender

Gender Semiotics, Anglo-Frisian , and Old Frisian Noun Gender

Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak

The experimental studies presented in this paper exploit agreement attraction in order to examine the mechanisms underlying the production of subject–verb agreement in Slovak. Our experiments verify that the processes which specify the gender feature on past tense verbs are subject to interference from local nouns, and that the likelihood of interference from the local noun depends on the relative markedness of the subject phrase’s head and local noun gender. The results suggest that, unlike the asymmetries observed with the two-term opposition between singular and plural, the markedness asymmetries observed with the three Slovak genders are not explicable solely in terms of the under-specification (or default status) of the unmarked value. The results also indicate that the likelihood of attraction depends on the case form of the head and local noun. The effects relating to gender markedness and to grammatical case provide evidence that producing subject–verb agreement requires the retrieval of an agreement source from content-addressable working memory.

The idea behind Genders: A simple tutorial package designed to help learners of French to internalise knowledge of noun gender distinctions

Noun gender is one of the most, if not the most, exasperating features of French for a learner. Apart from a relatively small number of words whose gender is set semantically (père, mère, fils etc.) there seems to be no reason why a table, freedom or France itself should be feminine, while a wall, a beginning or Japan should be masculine.

How Formal Versus Semantic Gender Influences the Interpretation of Person Denotations

Two studies assessed how gender-marked person denotations in German are interpreted in contrast to their unmarked counterparts in English. Participants read sentences about national groups denoted by nouns of masculine gender in German (Experiment 1) and by gender-unmarked nouns in English (Experiment 2). These statements were followed by a sentence that contained a reference to the subject of the first sentence and expressed either stereotypically feminine, stereotypically masculine, or gender-neutral content. Reading times for the second sentences indicate the ease of reference resolution which depends on the fit between the first sentence’s subject and the gender relatedness of the second sentence. Results show that grammatical gender in German slowed down the reading of information that was mismatched as to gender. No effect occurred in the English study. Results are discussed in terms of the theoretical framework of scenario mapping and focus ( Sanford & Garrod, 1981 , 1998 ).

Operational Noology as a new methodology for the study of thought and language: theoretical aspects and possible practical applications

In this article, the author presents a new methodology for the study of two fundamental components of consciousness, that is thought and language. The fundamental presupposition that forms the basis of this methodology is that thought is not simply a passive "reflection" of an external "reality", but also (and especially) something active, i.e. that the fundamental components of thought are sequences of operations, amongst which the ones of attention play a key role. These sequences of elementary mental operations are called mental categories, and are the meanings of all the words that do not seem to indicate something physical (first of all, all the "grammatical" words, that is conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns, fundamental verbs like "to be", "to have" etc., the main adverbs, and, in the large number of languages that have a more or less rich morphology, all morphemes (the ones which indicate cases, in languages that have cases, the number and the gender of nouns and adjectives, moods and tenses of the verb etc.). The author proposes a list of these elementary mental operations and he shows how it is possible, basing ourselves on them, to identify the meanings of these words, which are indispensable for any linguistic expression. The author also mentions a possible short-term practical application of these theories, i.e. a device in order to improve the quality of machine translation. He also formulates the hypothesis that these theories could allow us to look in a new way at the problem of the (partial) artificial reproduction of the human activity of thought and language.

Lexicon and Context in Feminization in Russian

Many nouns in Russian identify people in terms of membership in groups, defined by activity, role, beliefs, attributes, or origins. Many of these nouns are derived with native Russian suffixes (учи-тель, добровол-ец, сторон-ник, гардероб-щик, прыг-ун); the occasional noun is unsuffixed (врач). Some nouns identifying group membership are borrowings, with or without an etymological suffix in the source language (диктор, корректор, педагог, президент). Most of these masculine nouns of the first declension can form corresponding feminine derivatives of the second declension by adding a suffix, either a modified or expanded form of the masculine suffix, for example -ник/-ница (сторон-ник/сторон-ница), -щик/-щица (гардероб-щик/ гардероб-щица), -ун/-унья (бегун/бегунья) or an additional suffix, -иха (врач/врач-иха), -ша (редактор/редактор-ша), -ка (солист/солист-ка). As is well-known, there is an asymmetry in the usage of these first-declension nouns and their second-declension correlates. The second-declension nouns can refer only to women, but the first-declension nouns can be used in reference to women as well as to men. As a consequence, a man can only be named with a masculine noun, but a woman can in principle be identified by either kind of noun: as врач or врачиха ,a sруководитель or руководительница ,a sписатель or писательница ,a sсторонник or сторонница. It is then natural to ask how, in referring to a woman, speakers make the choice between the correlative masculine and feminine nouns. The modest literature treating these correlative noun pairs has emphasized the social status of women in various occupations and the stylistic properties of the feminine noun. R. Rothstein (1973), observing that “the relative liberation of women in 1917 produced a need for new terminology to refer to women occupying certain jobs or professions”, analyzed the changes in language that came in the wake of this social upheaval by appealing to the markedness of gender: nouns of the masculine gender, unmarked with respect to the feminine, can be used broadly to refer to women. 1 Krysin (Крысин 1974, 277‐296) differentiated lexical items according to the stylistic value of the feminine derivative and constructed two tests that were submitted to approximately three thousand speakers for self-reporting. In one test, speakers were given a list

Multifunctional agreement patterns in Bantu and the possibility of genderless nouns

It is generally assumed that all nouns belong to a gender in gender languages and that this constitutes a undamental difference between gender systems and systems of noun classifiers. An analysis of gender and agreement in the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton challenges this assumption. Gender assignment cannot be predicted on semantic grounds in Eton, except for proper names and deictic kinship terms. Although these nouns trigger the same agreement pattern as nouns of gender 1, their behaviour differs too much from the other nouns for them to be analysed as gender 1 words. It is argued that they form the core of a set of genderless nouns. The agreement pattern they trigger is a multifunctional one: it marks agreement with gender 1 words and with genderless words. It will be shown that multifunctionality is a typical characteristic of agreement patterns in Bantu.

Gender and Spanish agentive suffixes: Where the motivated meets the arbitrary

The gender of inanimate nouns in Spanish is generally regarded as being arbitrary. Alvar and Pottier are at some pains to substantiate this view on the basis of the history of gender inheritance an...

The Role of Diminutives in the Acquisition of Russian Gender: Can Elements of Child‐Directed Speech Aid in Learning Morphology?

This study investigated second‐language (L2) learning to gain a better understanding of learning mechanisms that also operate in child first‐language (L1) learners. The research was inspired by research on the beneficial effects of child‐directed speech (CDS). We tried to examine whether such benefits can be observed in the domain of inflectional morphology in adult L2 learners. Specifically, we investigated whether one typical feature of CDS, diminutivization, can facilitate learning of Russian gender. Diminutives (i.e., the translational equivalent of doggy, birdie, etc.) are a pervasive feature of Russian CDS. Olmsted (1994) suggested that the frequent use of diminutives in Russian CDS may facilitate the child's acquisition of grammatical gender because it eliminates nontransparent morphophonological marking. To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning directly, adult native speakers of English were taught a variety of Russian nouns, with half of the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on the nondiminutive base forms. Over 4 sessions, participants learned to use color adjectives to name the color of the objects depicting the nouns. In Russian, adjectives have to agree in gender with the nouns they modify; correct adjective agreement was used as a measure of gender learning. The diminutive training group demonstrated better learning of noun gender and better generalization to novel word forms and novel nouns, thus confirming the beneficial effects of diminutives on gender learning. The observed diminutive benefit for gender agreement has subsequently been demonstrated in Russian children (Kempe, Brooks, Mironova, & Fedorova, 2003), both for familiar and, in even more pronounced ways, for novel nouns, thus confirming the generalizability of the results to L1 learners. In light of these later findings, the present study underscores the importance of complementary research in L1 and L2 learning so that important questions about the nature of L1 acquisition may be answered by means of controlled manipulation of the language input in L2 learning.

Grammatical gender is selected in bare noun production: Evidence from the picture–word interference paradigm

Most current models of language production assume that information about gender is selected only in phrasal contexts, and that the phonological form of a noun can be accessed without selecting its syntactic properties. In this paper, we report a series of picture–word interference experiments with Italian-speaking participants where the grammatical gender of nouns and the phonological transparency of suffixes have been manipulated. The results showed a consistent and robust effect of grammatical gender in the production of bare nouns. Naming times were slower to picture–word pairs sharing the same grammatical gender. As reported in studies with Romance languages, the gender congruity effect disappeared when participants were required to produce the noun preceded by the definite determiner. Our results suggest that the selection of grammatical gender reflects a competitive process preceding the access to morpho-phonological forms and that it is mandatory, i.e., it occurs also when the noun has to be produced outside a sentential context.

Grammatical Gender Effects on Cognition: Implications for Language Learning and Language Use.

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.

Phonological facilitation of grammatical gender retrieval

In Dutch, the gender of nouns is marked by the definite articles de (common gender) and het (neuter gender). Most models of language production assume that gender information is retrieved via the noun's syntactic representation (or lemma). The authors test Caramazza's (1997) alternative proposal, according to which gender information is retrieved via the noun's phonological word form (or lexeme). In three picture-word experiments, which differed in the tasks to be performed (noun production, article+noun production, article production, and gender decision), clear phonological effects were obtained in tasks involving the retrieval of the noun's gender information. It is argued that traditional models of language production have difficulty in accounting for the occurrence and/or the size of these effects whereas they follow quite naturally from Caramazza's (1997) Independent Network model.

Gender and lexical access in Bulgarian.

Two procedures were used to explore the effects of semantic and grammatical gender on the recognition and processing of Bulgarian nouns, in relation to other factors that are known to affect lexical access. This study in a three-gender language was modeled on previous work in Italian, a two-gender language (Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, D'Amico, & Hernandez, 1995). Words were presented auditorily in randomized lists in two tasks: (1) repeat the word as quickly as possible and (2) determine the grammatical gender of the noun as soon as possible and indicate the decision by pressing a button. Reaction times in both tasks were influenced by phonological factors, word frequency, and irregularity of gender marking, but semantic and grammatical gender affected only gender monitoring. The significant contribution of semantic gender to processing in Bulgarian contrasts with previous findings for Italian. Also, we obtained an interaction between sex of the subject and noun gender, reflecting a bias toward one's own grammatical gender "counterpart" (especially for females). Reanalysis of the prior study in Italian showed a similar interaction but confirmed no effects of the semantic gender of the noun, suggesting that these two natural gender effects can dissociate. Possible reasons for cross-linguistic differences are discussed, with implications for comparative studies of gender and lexical access.