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.

中文翻译：

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失语症西班牙语使用者的语义和语法性别处理

摘要

背景

以前的研究认为，语言性别有两种类型：语法性别，任意分配给名词，语义性别，取决于所指对象的性别。

目标

我们通过调查失语症患者在句子处理水平上的表现来探索这两种类型的性别需要不同的认知过程的假设。

方法和程序

9 名失语症患者（7 名流利失语症患者）和 13 名年龄匹配的健康参与者组成的对照组参加了一项受限完成选择任务。参与者必须以使最后一个词的性别一致的方式完成句子。句子的主题有语义性别（enfermera，护士；指示所指对象的性别），语法性别（silla，椅子）或不透明语法性别（tomate，番茄）。

结果

失语症患者在所有性别条件下的表现都比健康对照组差。它们在语法和不透明语法条件下的准确度也低于语义性别条件。

结论

我们提出，由于语义性别提供了更多显着信息，因此它的处理速度比语法性别更快。