L1 Grammatical Gender Variation through the Representation in the Lexicon

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Native speakers are often assumed to have uniform language processing.
• Ongoing language change, like Norwegian gender system evolution, offers a unique context to study processing variations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how the ongoing shift from three to two genders in Norwegian affects native speakers' processing.
• To identify and characterize different processing groups based on their use of grammatical gender.

Main Methods:

• A gender decision task was administered to Norwegian speakers.
• Participants classified 32 nouns of each gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) by selecting the correct indefinite article.
• Reaction times (RTs) were recorded and analyzed.

Main Results:

• Three distinct speaker groups emerged: consistent three-gender, consistent two-gender, and unstable gender users.
• Two-gender speakers exhibited faster overall RTs.
• Three-gender speakers were slower with masculine nouns, while unstable users showed slower RTs for both masculine and feminine nouns.

Conclusions:

• Native speakers of the same language can possess different underlying representations of grammatical gender.
• Language change can lead to observable heterogeneity in psycholinguistic processing within a speaker community.
• Processing speed and accuracy correlate with the degree of adherence to the traditional or evolving gender system.