Gender Agreement: a psycholinguistic and aphasia case study.

• ¹ Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
• ² Ospedale San Camillo, Italy

Introduction Some Italian nouns occur as couples like cavallo-cavalla (horse-mare) showing a systematic relation between their grammatical Gender and the sex of their referents. An aphasia case study by Franzon, Bertocci and Semenza (2013) suggested that in these nouns Gender could be assigned depending on the referential context. Here we study Agreement processes in the Determiner Phrase (DP) with reference to contextually inflected nouns, by contrasting them with nouns whose gender presents the more common inherent inflection for Gender. The study comprises an experiment on normal participants and preliminary observation in two aphasic patients unaffected by agrammatism. Methods Noun phrases made of a noun and an adjective appeared on the screen. One of the two words lacked the ending morpheme (e.g. COLP_ GROSSO). 24 participants were asked to complete the word with either –a or –o (endings for masculine and feminine nouns in Italian). Response times and accuracy were measured. Materials: a) 24 nouns, 12 masculine + 12 feminine, like CAVALLO – CAVALLA (Context Dependent Gender.) b) 24 nouns, 12 masculine + 12 feminine, like COLPO-COLPA, ‘hit’ - ‘guilt’ (Inherent Gender). c) 96 filler nouns Type of Completion (on noun or adjective) and Position (noun first, adjective first) were considered. The same material was administered off-line to one person with transcortical motor aphasia (MM) and to another person with conduction aphasia (DMD). None of these patients showed signs of agrammatism. Results Context Dependent nouns were completed more accurately and significantly (p < 0.001) faster (949) than Inherent Gender nouns (1003). Adjectives were completed more accurately and significantly (p < 0.001) faster (951 msec) than nouns (1001 msec). MA committed 8/48 errors in Context Dependent and 11/48 errors in Inherent Gender nouns. DMD committed 2/48 errors in Context Dependent and 7/48 errors in Inherent Gender nouns. Discussion Results match with theories (Alexiadou 2004; Franzon et al. 2013) that propose two types of gender: a non-interpretable one, set by the lexicon and thus inherent on the noun (as in colpo – colpa); and a variable one (as in cavallo-cavalla), interpretable at a semantic level, assigned in syntax on the basis of the referential context. This latter condition seems to require less processing costs, even if less common; when the morpheme lacks semantic interpretability processing costs are higher. Completion on adjectives is faster because such an operation consists in copying into the higher DP positions the morphosyntactic values of Gender that have already been processed in the noun; conversely, when the noun has to be completed, it has to undergo further processing before rising to the DP to check the agreement in a proper position.