Gender Of Nouns Research Articles

Role of grammatical gender and semantics in German word production.

Semantic substitution errors (e.g., saying "arm" when "leg" is intended) are among the most common types of errors occurring during spontaneous speech. It has been shown that grammatical gender of German target nouns is preserved in the errors (E. Mane, 1999). In 3 experiments, the authors explored different accounts of the grammatical gender preservation effect in German. In all experiments, semantic substitution errors were induced using a continuous naming paradigm. In Experiment 1, it was found that gender preservation disappeared when speakers produced bare nouns. Gender preservation was found when speakers produced phrases with determiners marked for gender (Experiment 2) but not when the produced determiners were not marked for gender (Experiment 3). These results are discussed in the context of models of lexical retrieval during production.

Syntactic mediation is not obligatory during lexical access: Evidence from a single-case study of Welsh Aphasia

Current models of word production assume the existence of functionally distinct lexical-syntactic and word-form representations. However, there are competing hypotheses about whether prior access to syntactic properties of words is obligatory during lexical retrieval. In this paper we report preliminary evidence from the single case study of a Welsh-speaking patient with a lexical access deficit. We examined the patient’s ability to access word forms and to retrieve information about the grammatical gender of Welsh nouns. The data show no correlation between the retrieval of word-form and grammatical gender information. This pattern of performance is inconsistent with hypotheses postulating obligatory syntactic mediation in lexical production.

The processing of Determiner – Noun agreement and the identification of the gender of Nouns in the early acquisition of Portuguese

The early acquisition of the Portuguese gender system is investigated. It is argued that the acquisition of the gender system is based upon the identification of morpho-phonological information within the closed class of determiners and upon the processing of agreement within the DP. Experimental evidence is provided for young children’s sensibility to morpho-phonological alterations in the class of determiners and for children’s reliance on this sort of information in the identification of the gender of novel nouns. Developmental differences in the effect of a phonology-gender analogy in the processing of gender agreement suggest that the effect of this factor after the age of three is dependent upon the gender system of the language having been identified on the basis of grammatical agreement at an earlier age. A theoretical account is provided in terms of a processing model that incorporates a theory of language in which agreement is characterized as feature sharing.

Phonological Memory and Rule Learning

Two experiments examined the relationship between individual differences in phonological memory (PM) and the ability to learn determiner–noun agreement rules in semiartificial microlanguages. Participants were tested on their ability to induce the grammatical gender of nouns from the distribution of the determiners that accompanied them. Three measures of PM were found to be related to rule learning as assessed by a generalization test: phonological short–term memory, vocabulary learning, and memory for determiner–noun combinations early in the experiment. There were also statistically independent effects of knowledge of other gender languages, suggesting that both memory and nonmemory factors were related to learning outcomes.

The gender congruency effect and the selection of freestanding and bound morphemes: evidence from croatian.

The authors report 3 picture-word interference experiments in which they explore some properties of the agreement process in speech production. In Experiment 1, Croatian speakers were asked to produce utterances in which the noun's gender value had an impact on the selection of gender-marked freestanding morphemes (pronouns) while ignoring the presentation of same- or different-gender distractor words. In Experiments 2 and 3, Croatian speakers were asked to name the same pictures using noun phrases in which the noun's gender value surfaced as an inflectional suffix. Different-gender distractors interfered more than same-gender distractors (the gender congruency effect) in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 and 3. These contrasting results show that the cause of the gender congruency effect is not at the level where lexical-grammatical information is selected but at the level of selection of freestanding morphemes.

Gender and Case in Agrammatic Production

Omission and substitution of articles have often been mentioned as characteristics of agrammatic speech. In these descriptions, articles are considered to be so-called function wordsor closed-class words. These are supposed to be difficult for agrammatic speakers. From a linguistic point of view, the class of function words is far from homogeneous and even within the class of articles different linguistic properties can be distinguished. In many languages — Dutch, German, Italian and Portuguese are used as examples in this paper — the article is specified for gender. In German the article is specified for case as well. Gender and case differ from both a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point of view. Gender information is part of the word form. In some languages, gender can be derived from the word-form (as in Portuguese or Italian), while in other languages, the gender of nouns is stored as part of the word-form (as in Dutch and German). Case is a syntactic notion and relates to a dependency between the constituents in a sentence. Bearing in mind the fact that article production is impaired in agrammatic Broca's aphasia, one may wonder whether gender and/or case information plays a role here. For the present study, article production of nine Dutch and ten German individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia has been analyzed and the data show that most substitution errors concern case; the gender of the produced articles is usually correct. This supports the hypothesis that agrammatic speech is the consequence of an underlying deficit in syntacticprocessing.

Syntactic Processing Modulates the θ Rhythm of the Human EEG

Changes in oscillatory brain dynamics can be studied by means of induced band power (IBP) analyses, which quantify event-related changes in amplitude of frequency-specific EEG rhythms. Such analyses capture EEG phenomena that are not part of traditional event-related potential measures. The present study investigated whether IBP changes in the δ, θ, and α frequency ranges are sensitive to syntactic violations in sentences. Subjects read sentences that either were correct or contained a syntactic violation. The violations were either grammatical gender agreement violations, where a prenominal adjective was not appropriately inflected for the head noun's gender, or number agreement violations, in which a plural quantifier was combined with a singular head noun. IBP changes of the concurrently measured EEG were computed in five frequency bands of 2-Hz width, individually adjusted on the basis of subjects' α peak, ranging approximately from 2 to 12 Hz. Words constituting a syntactic violation elicited larger increases in θ power than the same words in a correct sentence context, in an interval of 300–500 ms after word onset. Of all the frequency bands studied, this was true for the θ frequency band only. The scalp topography of this effect was different for different violations: following number violations a left-hemispheric dominance was found, whereas gender violations elicited a right-hemisphere dominance of the θ power increase. Possible interpretations of this effect are considered in closing.

On the assessment of grammatical gender knowledge in aphasia: The danger of relying on explicit, metalinguistic tasks

We report the case of a bilingual Italian-English aphasic patient, ED, who was very poor at categorising Italian nouns for grammatical gender in explicit, metalinguistic tasks, and was at chance when gender could not be inferred from the word's phonology. In contrast, ED showed a good ability to modify adjectives to match the gender of nouns in a task that involved translating adjective-noun phrases from English into Italian. Access to wordspecific gender knowledge in aphasic patients should not be tested solely by means of tasks requiring explicit gender judgements but should be assessed using tasks that come as close as possible to the circumstances of natural language processing.

Noun phrase morphology in Swedish-speaking children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.

Slovene: A Comprehensive Grammar by Peter s> Herrity (review)

722 SEER, 79, 4, 200I TEI standards for this type of work a question already implied by the enormous and ever-growingextension file that it requires. Particularlyinterestingto readerswith a backgroundin the humanities are the articleswhich approach the subjectfrom the other side, from the point of view of the computer scientist. Dobreva is right to stress the necessity of adheringto establishedproceduresinproductdevelopment;sheandM.Jordanova also drawattentionto a numberof practicalissues,notablytheproblems caused by entering data in transcription. They could be more forceful in drawing the necessary conclusion that data should be entered in the originalcyrillicand converted automaticallyto SGML entities, which are the only standardfor text encoding and interchange.This can be done easilywith the existing technology. The various transcriptionselaborated by R. Lazov then become redundant or, if required for any purpose, can be generated from the SGML. The editing of such a disparatevolume must have been a taxing exercise, and though there are some lapses there arereferenceson pp. 97 and I 76 to a non-existent Appendix i, and a number of proper names appearin unusual forms it has been accomplished remarkablywell by a team only one of whom has Englishas his native language. The book is a usefuladdition to the small but growing literatureon the subject.It is particularlyto be hoped that it will come to the attention of those engaged in computer applicationsin the humanitiesoutsidethe field of medieval Slavonic manuscripts. University ofPortsmouth R. M. CLEMINSON Herrity, Peter. Slovene. A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge, London and New York,2000. xii + 372 pp. Bibliography.Index. / 25.00 (paperback). HALF a century has elapsed since R. G. A. de Bray's Guideto theSlavonic Languages (London, I95I) gave us the firstEnglishdescriptionof the rudiments of Slovene grammar.It was the only thing of itskind, untilJ. Toporisic'sZakaj nepo slovensko. Slovene byDirectMethod(Ljubljana, 1970) eventually made it really possible for English-speaking students to learn the language. Since Slovenia became an independent state in I99I severalmore useful textbooks in English have been published, most notably W. W. Derbyshire's A Basic Slovene Reference Grammar (Columbus, OH, I993), but the appearancenow of a new grammar by ProfessorPeter Herrity is an event of exceptional importance . It describes itself as 'the firstcomprehensive grammar of the language to be published in English', a reasonable claim in view of its 372 pages, compared to Derbyshire's 154. The structureof Herrity'swork is traditional and straightforward.It consists of thirteen chapters: i. phonology; 2. nouns; 3. adjectives;4. pronouns; 5. numerals;6. verbs; 7. adverbs;8. prepositions; 9. conjunctions; io. particles; ii. interjections; 12. word order; I3. word formation. Each chapter is divided and subdivided into individual features and rules,which are cogently expounded and amplyillustratedby well-chosen examples. Apart from the chapter on word order, syntax is not presented separatelybut dealt with throughout as and when necessary. The chapter on word formation is brief, this too having already appeared to a large extent in REVIEWS 723 the previous chapters.The tried and tested method of interweavinginflexion, derivation, and syntax, especially in chapters two to seven, works well. In chapter two, for example, noun declensions are followed by explanations of the use of the cases. This system works well in chapter six too, where conjugationsprecede explanationsof verbalsyntax.It may be as a resultof an oversightthat on pp. I78-79 the formation of the 1-participlecomes afterthe rulesfor its agreement. The explanation of the modal verbs (a difficultarea)is particularlyoriginal(pp. I99-202), but glossingthe modal adverblahko; as 'to be able, can', as if it were a verb (and it certainly appears in translationsof English 'can'),is going too far.I was surprisednot to findEnglish'must'in the gloss for modrati (it does occur in the examples) or 'must not' in the gloss and examples of nesmeti.A specific warning should have been given about the pitfallsattendingthe negation of 'must'and 'can'. Not surprisingly in a text of such length and density, there are a few infelicitousturnsof phrasehere and there.In a discussionof nouns of common gender, the words 'the gender of the person referredto is determined by the context' (p. 29) presumably do not mean what they say, whilst the heading 'The pronunciation of vowels in the spoken language' (p. I 2) may make...

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

Diminutives are a pervasive feature of child‐directed speech (CDS) in Russian. Their frequent use might be beneficial for gender acquisition because it eliminates nontransparent morphophonological marking. To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns, with half of the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on the nondiminutive base forms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. Learners were then tested on various types of novel nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated better learning of noun gender, and better generalization to novel forms, indicating that regularization of gender marking through diminutives promotes the extraction of morphophonological regularities.

Gender differences in opioid-mediated analgesia: animal and human studies.

Gender differences in opioid-mediated analgesia: animal and human studies.

Grammatical gender in noun phrase production: the gender interference effect in German.

Languages appear to differ in the way definite determiners are selected during noun phrase production. M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (1999) proposed that a distinction should be made between early- and late-selection languages. In early-selection languages, the noun's gender uniquely specifies the definite determiner, whereas in late-selection languages the definite determiner can be specified only during the phonological encoding of the noun phrase. This hypothesis predicts that in picture-word interference experiments on noun phrase production in early selection languages like German, one should obtain a gender interference effect. In 2 experiments on German, this prediction is confirmed. The implications of these results for the proposed distinction between early- and late-selection languages are discussed.

The Gender Congruity Effect: Evidence from Spanish and Catalan

In five picture-word interference experiments we explore the gender congruity effect observed in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Participants' performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender of the picture and the gender of the word. The results show that the gender congruity effect is not a universal effect, but varies from language to language, depending on crucial characteristics of the gender/determiner selection system used to process a given language. Consistent with the crosslinguistic hypothesis presented by Miozzo and Caramazza we argue that the retrieval of the noun's gender is enough to specify the determiner's phonological form in Dutch, but not in Catalan or Spanish, and this is the cause of the failure to replicate the Dutch results in these two languages.

Gender processing in native and nonnative Russian speakers

Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (e.g., Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of noun endings (and other sublexical elements and morphological constituents) in marking gender, and that agreement markers can be used strategically to constrain the genders of ambiguously marked nouns. Adult native (L1) speakers of Russian (Experiment 1) and advanced nonnative (L2) speakers (Experiment 2) read Russian sentences on a computer and were asked to choose one of two inflected past tense verbs in a forced choice task. The verbs either matched or mismatched the gender of the subject NP. Half of the target trials used opaque (end-palatalized) subject nouns, which were ambiguously marked for gender, and the other half used transparent (regularly marked) subject nouns. Noun type was crossed with the presence or absence of a gender-marked adjective in the subject NP. When an adjective was present in the subject NP, both L1 and L2 speakers were significantly faster at reading and selecting the correct verb form. L2 but not L1 speakers showed longer reading and choice latencies and made more errors when the subject noun was opaque. The data showed that L2 speakers used adjective inflections to disambiguate the gender of opaque subject nouns and to select gender appropriate verb inflections. The accuracy data for L1 and L2 speakers were tested against several connectionist models. The models' success in accounting for the data suggested that L1 and L2 speakers may depend on a common learning mechanism and thus resemble one another at the computational level, contrary to traditional computational accounts (Carroll, 1989, 1995).

Processing of grammatical gender in a three-gender system: experimental evidence from Russian.

Four experiments investigated the effect of grammatical gender on lexical access in Russian. Adjective-noun pairs were presented auditorily, using a cued-shadowing technique in which subjects must repeat the second word (the target noun), following adjectives that are either concordant or discordant with the noun's gender. Experiment 1 demonstrates gender priming with unambiguous adjectives and phonologically transparent masculine or feminine nouns. Experiment 2 examines priming for transparent nouns against a neutral baseline (possible only for feminines and neuters), revealing that priming is due primarily to inhibition from discordant gender. Experiment 3 demonstrates gender priming with phonologically opaque masculine and feminine nouns. Experiment 4 returns to transparent masculine and feminine nouns with a different kind of baseline, using three versions of a single word root (prost--simple, in the feminine adjectival form prostaja, masculine adjectival form prostoj, and the adverbial form prosto), and shows that gender can also facilitate lexical access, at least for feminine nouns. We conclude that Russian listeners can exploit gender agreement cues "on-line," helping them to predict the identity of an upcoming word.

Gender Processing in Speech Production: Evidence from German Speech Errors

The present study investigates the relationship between gender processing and the properties of speech errors. Studying German noun substitution errors it was found that intended and intruded nouns were more often of the same grammatical gender than one would expect by chance (“identical gender effect”). In the present study, German slips of the tongue were investigated on the assumption that the occurrence of the identical gender effect depends on the processing level, where the error arises. The syntactic context preceding errors of nonidentical gender was also explored. In the German language, interactions of nonidentical gender nouns often result in agreement violations. It can be shown that gender congruency between nouns and preceding articles also depends on the processing level at which the noun error occurs. The results are consistent with two-stage models of lexical retrieval and speech production, according to which the syntactic information of a noun is only represented during the first stage of lexical access.

Syntactic processes in speech production: the retrieval of grammatical gender

Jescheniak and Levelt (Jescheniak, J.-D., Levelt, W.J.M. 1994. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 20 (4), 824–843) have suggested that the speed with which native speakers of a gender-marking language retrieve the grammatical gender of a noun from their mental lexicon may depend on the recency of earlier access to that same noun's gender, as the result of a mechanism that is dedicated to facilitate gender-marked anaphoric reference to recently introduced discourse entities. This hypothesis was tested in two picture naming experiments. Recent gender access did not facilitate the production of gender-marked adjective noun phrases (Experiment 1), nor that of gender-marked definite article noun phrases (Experiment 2), even though naming times for the latter utterances were sensitive to the gender of a written distractor word superimposed on the picture to be named. This last result replicates and extends earlier gender-specific picture-word interference results (Schriefers, H. 1993. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19 (4), 841–850), showing that one can selectively tap into the production of grammatical gender agreement during speaking. The findings are relevant to theories of speech production and the representation of grammatical gender for that process.

‘De la belle ouvrage’: cross–gendering in unconventional French

AbstractIn spite of the linguistic ‘dirigisme’ during the past three and a half centuries, there remains in contemporary French a number of nouns of double or doubtful gender. Non-standard usage is potentially even more prone to fluctuation and hesitation, given the relative lack of awareness in spontaneous, informal speech of official norms. The changes of gender that have occurred and the anomalies – real or perceived – that have arisen in unconventional French are attributable to a variety of processes, both morpho-syntactic and semantic in nature. Most cases can be explained in terms of one or other of these processes (e.g. apocope, ellipsis, syllepsis). However some remain mysterious, contradicting established patterns. Intra-register gender attraction may well occur, though it is likely to be unconscious. The question of zero gender and neutralization is also raised.

Le ou La? The Gender of French Nouns

Testing your gender assignment competence learning from children about learning genders the great divide - sematic versus grammatical gender the link between gender and phonetic word ending meaning and the gender of inanimate nouns the role of word structure in determining gender biological or sociological gender - the gender of animate nouns gender makes the difference - distinguishing between homophones seeing how the network operates in conclusion.