The gender puzzle in Spanish: Multiple factors conditioning the gender (in)congruence effect during sentence comprehension

Abstract

The effect of gender (in)congruence has been extensively studied in both comprehension and language production processes. Especially for the Romance languages, both theoretical and empirical discussions are based on the double status of gender as a lexical phenomenon with syntactic projection. Furthermore, for languages with grammatical gender and for nouns that refer to people, the interaction between semantic information associated with gender stereotypes and morphological markings seems unavoidable. Considering this general framework, we designed two sentence comprehension experiments in Spanish (Experiment 1: self-paced reading task and Experiment 2: L(exical)-maze task) using a psycholinguistic approach to assess the interplay between gender stereotypes associated with the role noun semantics and morphological gender markings. Both experiments present a 2x2 factorial design: Semantic Bias (male vs. female) and Gender Morphology (masculine, feminine), with two congruent and two incongruent conditions. Our results show patterns consistent with a facilitation effect for gender congruent conditions. Specifically, in Experiment 2, we found a significant asymmetrical effect of gender (in)congruence: male-biased role nouns represented the extreme conditions, showing a statistically significant (in)congruence effect. We discuss various factors that may influence gender (in)congruence effects during reading and sentence comprehension: incremental syntactic-semantic processes, task-dependent effects, incidence of the marked-unmarked axis in Spanish gender morphology paradigm. We propose, in line with previous studies, that, for Romance languages, gender processing involves the interaction of multiple levels, both semantic-conceptual and grammatical.