Grammatical gender is a key feature in many languages and varies in transparency. While in Spanish, for example, there are clear cues such as “-a” for the feminine and “-o” for the masculine, in Dutch this relationship is more opaque. This phenomenon is known as the “continuum of gender transparency”.
Montserrat Comesaña Vila, CIPsi’s researcher, collaborated with researchers from the CIMCYC, the Goethe University Frankfurt and the University of Santiago de Compostela to develop a model to quantify grammatical gender transparency. This model, tested with Portuguese and Dutch, makes it possible to predict the acquisition, representation and processing of gender in different languages.
The research confirmed that transparent languages, such as Portuguese, facilitate the learning and understanding of grammatical gender, in contrast to more opaque languages, such as Dutch.
The results open up new possibilities for exploring the impact of grammatical gender on mental language processing.
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Full reference: Sá-Leite, A. R., Simpson, I. C., Fraga, I. & Comesaña, M. (2024). A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages. Acta Psychologica, 246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104236