Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia
G. Piazza, M. Calabria, C. Semenza & C. Poletto (2022) Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia, Aphasiology, 36:8, 940-961, DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2021.1924355
Aphasiology
Aphasiology
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.