Two routes to grammatical gender: Evidence from hebrew

Tamar H. Gollan*, Ram Frost

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

73 Scopus citations

Abstract

Access to grammatical gender in Hebrew was examined using gender decisions and grammaticality judgments. In gender decisions, and in rejecting agreement violations, the role of gender-marking regularity was robust; irregular feminine nouns were classified more slowly and produced more errors than did regular masculine nouns. These same exception nouns, however, produced radically different results when they appeared as part of a grammatical phrase. In this context, irregular nouns were processed as quickly and accurately as were regular nouns. These findings are interpreted within a model containing two routes to grammatical gender: one that involves an abstract gender node, and another that is form-based and is assumed to play a greater role in recovery from agreement errors. We also argue that there are cross-linguistic variations in the availability and speed of the form-based route to gender. Finally, we caution that under some circumstances grammatical gender may also be retrieved through a variety of heuristics that do not necessarily reflect the normal mechanisms of access to gender.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)627-651
Number of pages25
JournalJournal of Psycholinguistic Research
Volume30
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - 2001

Keywords

  • Agreement
  • Grammatical gender
  • Hebrew
  • Regularity

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