Mental representation of grammatical gender features in German

What is it about?

The mental storing and processing of grammatical gender is controversially discussed among psycholinguists. We report a series of behavioural experiments investigating the processing of grammatical gender of nouns in German. Results consistently indicate processing differences between nouns of different genders. We assume that the lexical representation of nouns is characterized by underspecified gender information. This assumption is in contrast to more traditional views.

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Why is it important?

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.