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Part of
Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond: In honour of Leonardo M. Savoia
Edited by Mirko Grimaldi, Rosangela Lai, Ludovico Franco and Benedetta Baldi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 252] 2018
► pp. 97–109

Chapter 6
On gender and number

A psycholinguistic review

| Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia

In the theory of agreement developed by Chomsky (2000, 2001) φ features are undifferentiated, they are organized in a bundle of features, despite the intrinsically different information that each of them carries. However, while person is found to have an autonomous status in many psycholinguistic studies, number and gender show contrasting results: some studies show a crucial difference in the processing of number and gender, others, mainly ERP, do not. We will review the different psycholinguistic findings and we will propose that number and gender simply denote different nominal classes. The difference found in some experiments for number and gender maybe linked to when the feature is made available in the comprehension of the sentence (early/late cues).

Keywords: φ features, gender, number
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.On the Feature Strength Hypothesis: Number over gender
  • 3.Inflectional noun class morphology
  • 4.Possible explanations for the different status of number and gender in comprehension tasks
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.252.06lor
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