Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background

Previous studies have argued that there are two types of linguistic gender: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent.

Aim

We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence processing.

Methods and Procedure

Nine people with aphasia (seven with fluent aphasia) and a control group of thirteen age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (enfermera, nurse; indicating the gender of the referent), Grammatical gender (silla, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (tomate, tomato).

Results

People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the Grammatical and Opaque-Grammatical conditions than in the Semantic gender condition.

Conclusion

We propose that because semantic gender provides more salient information, it is processed faster than grammatical gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• agreement
• semantic gender
• grammatical gender
• sentence processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout this paper we will refer to the gender of the referent as the source for semantic gender. When referring to animal nouns, sex could be used instead. Without doubt, gender and sex have two substantially different meanings. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this paper, it is not always easy to determine which is the more appropriate term, because semantic gender pertains to both animals and humans. When referring to the semantic gender of human nouns, it is probably more correct to say it originates from gender, although (but this is not the aim of the paper) we do not know how semantic gender would be conceptualized in the case of non-correspondence between gender and sex.

2. In Spanish the verb to be can be expressed using two forms, derived from different roots, depending on the context.

3. The whole sentences, composed of the preamble + (correct gender choice) adjective, were similar to this example: El esposo en la iglesia está emocionado (“The spouse in the church was excited”).

Additional information

Funding

MC was supported by the postdoctoral Ramón y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2013-14013), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, National Research Agency), and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER, European Regional Development Fund) under projects PSI2017-87784-R and RED2018-102615-T.