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Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements

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Abstract

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112–143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants’ eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.

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Notes

  1. The notional effects described in the literature often involved a distributive meaning of the complete phrase, as in the distributive preamble “the picture on the postcards”, compared to the unitary preamble “the baby on the blankets”. Whereas the sensitivity of English speakers to distributive effects is inconclusive (Bock and Miller 1991; Vigliocco et al. 1996a, but see also Eberhard 1999), other languages have shown clear effects (in French: Vigliocco et al. 1996b, in Dutch: Hartsuiker et al. 1999; Vigliocco et al. 1996b, in Spanish: Vigliocco et al. 1996a, and in Italian: Vigliocco et al. 1995).

  2. In the case of inanimate nouns, these typical endings are believed to be part of nominal word-patterns called mishkalim, which are considered to be part of the derivational Hebrew system (see Dank and Deutsch 2010, for further discussion).

  3. One subject was deleted from the analysis due to missing data in one of the conditions.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (#0323157) to Avital Deutsch.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel

    Maya Dank & Avital Deutsch

  2. The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Kathryn Bock

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  1. Maya Dank
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  2. Avital Deutsch
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  3. Kathryn Bock
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Correspondence to Maya Dank.

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This research was supported by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (#0323157) to Avital Deutsch.

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Dank, M., Deutsch, A. & Bock, K. Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements. J Psycholinguist Res 44, 435–467 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9291-9

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