Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia

Published online: 30 May 2021.Background: Previous studies have argued that there are two types of linguistic gender: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent. Aim: We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence processing. Methods and Procedure: Nine people with aphasia (seven with fluent aphasia) and a control group of thirteen age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (enfermera, nurse; indicating the gender of the referent), Grammatical gender (silla, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (tomate, tomato). Results: People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the Grammatical and Opaque-Grammatical conditions than in the Semantic gender condition. Conclusion: We propose that because semantic gender provides more salient information, it is processed faster than grammatical gender.MC was supported by the postdoctoral Ramón y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2013-14013), Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, National Research Agency), and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER, European Regional Development Fund) under projects PSI2017-87784-R and RED2018- 102615-T

Semantic and gender priming in frontotemporal dementia

Modifications of language processing can be observed both in normal aging and in the most common forms of degenerative dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease and the spectrum of frontotemporal dementias. The present experiment tests at the same time semantic and syntactic aspects of language processing in patients with frontotemporal dementia, using an online paradigm that allows researchers to evaluate the real linguistic competence of the patients