Afonso, O. 1, 2 , Morales, D. 1 , Álvarez, C. J. 1 & Domínguez, A. 1
1 Universidad de La Laguna
2 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
Grammatical gender is a phenomenon present in many of the world’s languages. Because grammatical gender is typically non conceptual in nature, and cannot be derived from the meaning of the word, it is unclear how this is assigned during the comprehension and the production process. We address this issue by conducting two experiments in which participants had to perform a gender decision task over Spanish nouns. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the regularity of the endings of nouns ended in -o/-a (caso and mano are regular and irregular nouns respectively) and nouns with other endings, which are also biased to a particular gender (ciudad versus abad). The results showed that regularity affected reaction times and error rates only in the case of the nouns ending in -o/-a, suggesting that these endings were used as a cue to decide the noun’s gender. In Experiment 2, nouns ending in -o/-a and nouns with other endings were preceded by two different masked primes: a definite article (el, la), which provides information about the gender of the noun, or a possessive pronoun (mi, tu), which does not contain gender information. The presentation of the article produced shorter times compared with the possessive pronoun only in the case of phonologically opaque nouns. Taking together, these results indicate that gender of nouns ended in -o/-a is assigned through a process different from the rest of nouns. It seems that gender decisions for nouns ended in -o or -a rely on this sublexical information (the ending -o is attributed to the masculine gender and -a to the feminine gender), whereas the rest of nouns may require the retrieval of the article. Previous literature and theoretical models are discussed at the light of this new evidence.