GenLab - About GenPath

An image of a brain, symbolizing it has a cognitive representation of the masculine, feminine, and neuter gender values

For all speakers of gendered languages (that is, languages with grammatical gender systems, e.g., masculine, feminine, neuter, common), gender is processed by the brain every one to ten seconds during communication.

By processing we mean retrieving from memory the gender of a noun, and expressing this gender in other words, what we call agreement. So a Spanish speaker would say La casa bonita (the beautiful house), but El armario bonito (the beautiful wardrobe).

The first step in this process (retrieving the gender assigned to a noun) is necessary for the second step (agreement). Yet, most of the literature has been concerned with the second step.

GenPath focuses on the first step. Our main research question is: How does the brain retrieve gender information every time we read a noun?

And from that one general research question, the others follow:

The five research questions of GenPath, from the retrieval of gender by the brain of a native speaker, to that of a bilingual, to that of a learner, and to the possible connection between stereotypical information and a syntactic feature such as gender

A key factor to answer these questions is looking at gendered languages and understand that there are correlations between nouns' form (i.e., their orthography, phonology, or morphology) and their gender. The stronger and more regular these correlations are, the more transparent the gender system of a language. For instance, learners of Spanish have it easy; they benefit from high transparency, as feminine nouns often end in -a and masculine nouns in -o. In German, learners must consider a greater amount of information, since they rely on patterns like -ung, -keit, -heit, -e and etcetera, for the feminine gender, but with more exceptions.

Languages diverge on this relation between form and gender. This is called gender transparency, and a continuum has been theoretically proposed by Tanja Kupisch and her colleagues (2018, 2022):

The continuum of gender transparency as described by Tanja Kupisch and her colleagues in 2022, with Spanish being highly transparent, German moderately opaque, and Norwegian extremely opaque

The higher the degree of gender transparency of a language, the easier it is for a speaker of that language to correctly guess the gender of a new noun based on its form.

To answer our research questions, we need to understand that the degree of transparency of a language plays a key role in how the mechanisms behind gender retrieval operate. To study these mechanisms, in GenPath we use electroencephalographic measures: what is happening with our brain waves when we retrieve the gender of a noun?

GenPath thus aims to identify the neurocognitive markers of grammatical gender processing, focusing on the link between noun form and gender across languages with different degrees of gender transparency: Spanish, German, and Norwegian. We aim to refine existing psycholinguistic models of lexical access, explore differences between first and second language speakers, understand how the way we teach gender affects the way we acquire gender, and examine how noun gender morphology may interact with our social cognition, with our preconceived ideas about the sexed world during grammatical processing.

By integrating linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive, and social psychology, this multidisciplinary project seeks a deeper understanding of one of the most complex and intriguing features of human syntax.