Gender Features in German: Evidence for Underspecification
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2016/07/0028/000287Keywords:
grammatical gender, underspecification, German, mental lexiconAbstract
A series of behavioural experiments is reported that investigate the processing of grammatical gender of nouns in German. Results consistently indicate processing differences between nouns of different genders. Masculine nouns show indications of increased processing cost compared to feminine nouns. We assume that the lexical representation of nouns is characterized by underspecified gender information. This assumption is in contrast to more traditional views stating that only inflected forms are underspecified with respect to grammatical features. However, the presented account supports the idea that underspecification as a general characteristic of the mental lexicon is mainly driven by economical reasons: a feature that is never used for grammatical operations (e.g., evaluation of agreement) is not needed in the language system at all.
References
Blevins, J. 1995. Syncretism and paradigmatic opposition. *Linguistics and Philosophy*, 18, 113–152.
Bybee, J. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. *Language and Cognitive Processes*, 10(5), 425–455.
Caramazza, A., Laudanna, A., & Romani, C. 1988. Lexical access and inflectional morphology. *Cognition*, 28, 297–332.
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., Hadler, M., & Sonnenstuhl, I. 2001. The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German. *Language*, 77, 510–543.
Friederici, A. D., & Jacobson, Th. 1999. Processing grammatical gender during language comprehension. *Journal of Psycholinguistic Research*, 28, 467–484.
Halle, M., & Marantz, A. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In K. Hale & S. J. Keyser (Eds.), *The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger*. Vol. 24 of Current Studies in Linguistics (pp. 111–176). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. 1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*, 22(1), 1–75.
Opitz, A., Regel, St., Müller, G., & Friederici, A. D. 2013. Neurophysiological evidence for morphological underspecification in German strong adjective inflection. *Language*, 89(2), 231–264.
Penke, M. 2006. *Flexion im mentalen Lexikon*. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. 1982. An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 2. The contextual enhancement effect and some tests and extensions of the model. *Psychological Review*, 89, 60–94.
Stump, G. 2001. *Inflectional Morphology*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wunderlich, D. 1996. Minimalist morphology: The role of paradigms. In G. Booij & J. van Marle (Eds.), *Yearbook of Morphology 1995* (pp. 93–114). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
