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Grammatical gender

About: Grammatical gender is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1536 publications have been published within this topic receiving 34338 citations. The topic is also known as: Genus & gender.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The results confirm the persistent problems of Romance learners of Dutch with online gender processing and show that they cannot be overcome by reducing task demands related to the modality of stimulus presentation.
Abstract: Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can reveal online processing differences between native speakers and second language (L2) learners during language comprehension. Using the P600 as a measure of native-likeness, we investigated processing of grammatical gender agreement in highly proficient immersed Romance L2 learners of Dutch. We demonstrate that these late learners consistently fail to show native-like sensitivity to gender violations. This appears to be due to a combination of differences from the gender marking in their L1 and the relatively opaque Dutch gender system. We find that L2 use predicts the effect magnitude of non-finite verb violations, a relatively regular and transparent construction, but not that of gender agreement violations. There were no effects of age of acquisition, length of residence, proficiency or offline gender knowledge. Additionally, a within-subject comparison of stimulus modalities (written vs. auditory) shows that immersed learners may show some of the effects only in the auditory modality; in non-finite verb violations, an early native-like N400 was only present for auditory stimuli. However, modality failed to influence the response to gender. Taken together, the results confirm the persistent problems of Romance learners of Dutch with online gender processing and show that they cannot be overcome by reducing task demands related to the modality of stimulus presentation.

1,059 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations.
Abstract: The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations.

791 citations

Book
01 Jan 1980
TL;DR: This book discusses the role of language in Aboriginal Australian society today, and describes the classification of Australian languages and its role in speech and song styles.
Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Tribe and languages 3. Speech and song styles 4. The role of language in Aboriginal Australian society today 5. Vocabulary 6. Phonology 7. Phonological change 8. Classification of Australian languages 9. Word classes 10. Nouns 11. Pronouns 12. Verbs 13. Syntax 14. Summary.

518 citations

Book
01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: The nature of the Languages and relations among the languages are described and the Catalogue of Languages is described, which describes the relationships between the languages and describes the grammar categories.
Abstract: Introduction Part I. The Nature of the Languages: 1. Sounds and sound patterns 2. Words 3. Grammatical categories 4. Sentences 5. Special language Part II. Catalogue of Languages: 6. Relations among the languages 7. Catalogue.

443 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Overall, the data indicate that readers anticipate and attend to the gender of both articles and nouns, and use gender in real time to maintain agreement and to build sentence meaning.
Abstract: Recent studies indicate that the human brain attends to and uses grammatical gender cues during sentence comprehension. Here, we examine the nature and time course of the effect of gender on word-by-word sentence reading. Event-related brain potentials were recorded to an article and noun, while native Spanish speakers read medium- to high-constraint Spanish sentences for comprehension. The noun either fit the sentence meaning or not, and matched the preceding article in gender or not; in addition, the preceding article was either expected or unexpected based on prior sentence context. Semantically anomalous nouns elicited an N400. Gender-disagreeing nouns elicited a posterior late positivity (P600), replicating previous findings for words. Gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted in both the N400 window—with a larger negativity frontally for double violations—and the P600 window—with a larger positivity for semantic anomalies, relative to the prestimulus baseline. Finally, unexpected articles elicited an enhanced positivity (500–700 msec post onset) relative to expected articles. Overall, our data indicate that readers anticipate and attend to the gender of both articles and nouns, and use gender in real time to maintain agreement and to build sentence meaning.

427 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202339
202282
202156
202071
201986
201843