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Article published In: The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 17:1 (2022) ► pp.34–75

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Processing Spanish gender in a usage‑based model with special reference to dual‑gendered nouns

 | Brigham Young University
Published online: 8 April 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.21011.ell
Abstract
In an experiment, Spanish speakers assigned gender to nouns. Some nouns had biological referents. Others had a mismatch between their gender and their final phones (e.g. problema). Nouns with biological referents and nouns with matching gender and phonology were responded to faster suggesting that gender does not depend solely on a noun’s gender. Gender was also assigned to dual-gendered nouns, which are feminine nouns that take the masculine article el (e.g. agua). Most participants assigned them masculine gender.
Dual-gendered nouns are often preceded by masculine modifiers which is due to analogy to el. The idea is explored that the gender of el, along with all modifiers a noun has been experienced with, explains gender assignment. Computational simulations were carried out to test this using exemplar, naive Bayes, and decision tree algorithms. They made accurate predictions without referencing the noun’s gender. In dual-gendered nouns, a shift towards preposed masculine modifiers was observed. A simulation predicted the gender of bare dual-gendered nouns which mirrored the masculine gender the experimental participants provided. These results suggest a usage-based model in which a noun’s gender is determined by the modifiers it has been experienced with.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Dual-gendered nouns
  • The experiment
  • Procedure
  • Test items
  • Method
  • Participants
  • Statistical results
  • Biological gender and error rates
  • Biological gender and reaction time
  • Incongruently-gendered words and error rates
  • Incongruently-gendered words and reaction time
  • Dual-gendered nouns and error rates
  • Dual-gendered nouns and reaction times
  • Discussion of the results of the experiment
  • Processing of dual-gendered nouns
  • Usage-based models
  • Modeling gender in an exemplar model
  • Other computation models
  • Bayes classifiers
  • Decision trees
  • Modeling gender
  • Data
  • Variables used in simulations
  • Data sets used in simulations
  • Simulations
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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