Selective impairment of masculine gender processing: Evidence from a German aphasic

Abstract

The present single case study describes the performance of the German aphasic E.M. who exhibited a severe impairment of grammatical gender processing in masculine nouns but relatively spared performance regarding feminine and neuter ones. This error pattern was assessed with tests of gender assignment to orally or visually presented words, with oral or written responses, and with tests of gender congruency decision on noun phrases. The pattern occurred across tasks and modalities, thus suggesting a gender-specific impairment at a modality-independent level of processing. It was sensitive to frequency, thus supporting the assumption that access to gender features as part of grammatical processing is frequency sensitive. Besides being the first description of a gender-specific impairment in an aphasic subject, the data therefore have implications regarding the modelling of representation and processing of grammatical gender information within the mental lexicon.

Keywords:

• Grammatical gender
• Aphasia
• Lemma level
• Frequency
• Masculine nouns

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank E.M. (initials changed) for his cooperation in this study and his patience in all those hours of gender assignment.

Notes

¹ We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

² We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.