Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian

A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages

Languages can express grammatical gender through different ortho-phonological regularities present in nouns (e.g., the cues "-o" and "-a" for the masculine and the feminine respectively in Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish). The term "gender transparency" was coined to describe these regularities (Bates et al., 1995). In gendered languages, we can hence distinguish between transparent nouns, i.e., those displaying form regularities; opaque nouns, i.e., those with ambiguous endings; and irregular nouns, i.e., those that display the typical form regularities but are associated with the opposite gender. Following a descriptive analysis of such regularities, languages have been recently classified according to their degree of gender transparency, which seems relevant in regard to gender acquisition and processing. Yet, there are certain inconsistencies in determining which languages are overall transparent and which are opaque. In particular, it is not clear whether some other complex regularities such as derivational suffixes are also "transparent" cues for gender, what really constitutes an "opaque" noun, or which role orthography and morphology have in transparency. Given the existing inconsistencies in classifying languages as transparent or opaque, this work introduces a proposal to assess gender transparency systematically. Our methodology adapts the standardized factors proposed by Audring (2019) to analyse the relative complexity of gender systems. Such factors are adapted to gender transparency on the basis of the literature on gender acquisition and processing. To support the feasibility of such a proposal, the concepts have been instantiated in a quantitative model to obtain for the first time an objective measure of gender transparency using European Portuguese and Dutch as instances of target languages. Our results coincide with the theoretically expected outcome: European Portuguese obtains a high value of gender transparency while Dutch obtains a moderately low one. Future adaptations of this model to the gender systems of other languages could allow the continuum of gender transparency to sustain robust predictions in studies on gender processing and acquisition.

The role of word form in gender processing during lexical access: A theoretical review and novel proposal in language comprehension

In contrast to language production, there are few comprehension models of the representation and use of grammatical gender in long-term memory. To bridge this gap, we conducted a systematic review of empirical studies on the role of gender-form regularities in the recognition of nouns in isolation and within sentences. The results of a final sample of 40 studies suggest that there are two routes for the retrieval of gender during real-time comprehension: a form-based route and a lexical-based route. Our review indicates that the use of these routes depends on the degree of gender transparency of the language and the degree of overtness of the experimental paradigm. To accommodate these findings, we incorporate a dual-route mechanism within a general model of lexical access in comprehension, the AUSTRAL (Activation Using Structurally Tiered Representations and Lemmas) model, and identify directions for future research.

Infants aged 12 months use the gender feature in determiners to anticipate upcoming words: an eye-tracking study

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical Looking-While-Listening task. Children were presented with sentences and pictures of two objects representing nouns characterised by either the same gender (determiner was uninformative) or a different gender (determiner was informative). As expected, 20-month-old children recognised the target picture when this was named, and they were faster in the different-gender condition. Interestingly, 12-month-old infants identified the target picture only when presented with an informative determiner (different-gender condition). These results suggest that, as early as 12 months of age and with an improvement seen at 20 months of age, toddlers can extract and use determiner gender features to enhance comprehension and make predictions about upcoming words.

Form and Function: A Study on the Distribution of the Inflectional Endings in Italian Nouns and Adjectives

Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreement relations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing. Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between the inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural. Experimental research reports higher processing costs in the presence of a non-transparent relation between forms and values. While this effect was found in several languages, and typological research shows that consistency is far from common in morphological paradigms, it is still somewhat difficult to precisely quantify the transparency degree of the inflected forms. Furthermore, to date, no accounts have quantified the transparency in inflection with regard to the declensional classes and the extent to which it is expressed across different parts of speech, depending on whether these act as controllers of the agreement (e.g., nouns) or as targets (e.g., adjectives). We present a case study on Italian, a language that marks gender and number features in nouns and adjectives. This work provides measures of the distribution of forms in the noun and adjective inflection in Italian, and quantifies the degree of form-value transparency with respect to inflectional endings and declensional classes. In order to obtain these measures, we built Flex It, a dedicated large-scale database of inflectional morphology of Italian, and made it available, in order to sustain further theoretical and empirical research.

The role of semantics and repair processes in article-noun gender disagreement in Italian: An ERP study

In this sentence reading study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the processing mechanism of article-noun gender disagreement in two kinds of nouns in Italian. The first are nouns with syntactic gender (il treno_M 'train'; la sedia_F 'chair') for which the processing and repair of gender disagreement entails only one repair option, namely for the article (morphosyntactic repair). The second kind are nouns with semantic gender (il bambino_M 'boy', la bambina_F 'girl'). Here, there are two options for processing and repairing gender mismatch: repairing the article (morphosyntactic repair) or repairing the noun (both morphosyntactic and semantic repair). Both classes of nouns elicited the LAN, indicating that gender disagreement is always registered at the morphosyntactic level. In addition, the P600 was elicited in both conditions, but was larger for semantic gender, reflecting a more complex repair for this class of nouns.

Processing syntax: perspectives on language specificity

Objective: The past few decades of research in language processing provides empirical data on the dimensions of the brain-language relationship. The methodologies used to study language processing have evidenced an immense advancement over the years, tracking real-time processing events with millisecond precision. Event-related potentials is one such method which assists to visualize the neural mechanisms that underlie language processing. Different electrophysiological components mark different components of language depending on their structural and functional aspects. Since research on language processing is expanding its boundaries, the neural mechanisms for processing syntax components have been the focus of recent investigations across the languages of the world. The present review article aims to discuss the findings of studies on syntax processing besides highlighting the functional significance of P600, the electrophysiological marker of syntax processing.Methods: Electronic databases such as Pubmed, Science Direct, Research gate, PLOS, Directory of Open Access Journals were searched for relavant articles. The review process followed PRISMA guidelines for screening, identification, and selection of articles.Results: The results of the review elucidate the need for evaluating the finer details of syntax, including morpho-syntax concerning specific language structures. Studies across the languages of the world exemplify the uniqueness in the structure of different languages that may provide varied perspectives on the universality in syntax processing.Conclusion: The present review contributes a new dimension towards understanding the nature of syntax processing with respect to language specificity.

The Processing of Grammatical Gender Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: ERP Evidence in Favor of a Single Route

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the processing of grammatical gender agreement involving gender regular and irregular forms recruit the same or distinct neurocognitive mechanisms and whether different grammatical gender agreement conditions elicit the same or diverse ERP signals. Native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese read sentences containing congruent and incongruent grammatical gender agreement between a determiner and a regular or an irregular form (condition 1) and between a regular or an irregular form and an adjective (condition 2). However, in condition 2, trials with incongruent regular forms elicited more positive ongoing waveforms than trial with incongruent irregular forms. We found a biphasic LAN/P600 effect for gender agreement violation involving regular and irregular forms in both conditions. Our findings suggest that gender agreement between determiner and nouns recruits the same neurocognitive mechanisms regardless of the nouns' form and that, depending on the grammatical class of the words involved in gender agreement, differences in ERP signals can emerge.

Effects of subject-case marking on agreement processing: ERP evidence from Basque

Previous cross-linguistic research has found that comprehenders are immediately sensitive to various kinds of agreement violations across languages. We focused on Basque, a verb-final ergative language with both subject-verb (SV) and object-verb (OV) agreement. We compared the effects of SV agreement violations on comprehenders' event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in transitive sentences (where OV agreement is present, and the subject is ergative) and intransitive sentences (where OV agreement is absent, and the subject is absolutive). We observed a P600 effect in both cases, but only violations with intransitive subjects elicited an early posterior negativity. Such a qualitative difference suggests that distinct neurocognitive mechanisms are involved in processing agreement with transitive subjects (which are marked with ergative case) versus intransitive subjects (which bear absolutive case). Building on theoretical proposals that in languages such as Basque, true agreement occurs with absolutive subjects but not with ergative subjects, we submit that the early posterior negativity may be an electrophysiological signature for true agreement.