Classical Latin usually formed a grammatical feminine gender in « a » (silva – forest, aqua – water) and this was reflected in the feminine nouns of this period, such as Emilia. The Romance languages have retained this characteristic. For example, Spanish has about 89% female names with an ending « a » and 98% of first names with the same ending. [29] It can be assumed that both conclusions (a) and (b) reflect the competence of speakers with regard to aspects of gender equality. With regard to finding (a), the contrast between complex and simple feminine plurals should be particularly emphasized. This finding excludes the hypothesis of an inherently greater difficulty for plural feminine marking. On the other hand, he argues that the greatest difficulty associated with the treatment of the female sex lies in the process of integration (i.e. the process that integrates information from more than one lexical node). In particular, these results suggest that when two different female speakers need to be integrated, the rule of resolving female correspondences is not so strong that it completely excludes the possibility of male match marking. With regard to finding (b), it should be noted that the relative order of feminine and masculine nouns in mixed conjunctions may affect the acceptance and production by the participants of the noun-verb agreement. There is, in fact, independent evidence to suggest that the closer a noun appears to a verb near a sentence, the higher the probability that the noun will produce a false match with the verb (Haskell & MacDonald (2005; but see Vigliocco & Nicol (1998) and Franck et al.

(2002) for evidence against a noun-verb proximity role in the influence of the agreement). Our results do not relate directly to the question of noun-verb proximity, since the female noun has always been the first noun in mixed conjunctions – that is, the noun that is further away from the verb. On the contrary, we may have underestimated the extent to which Italian speakers tolerate female agreement with a conjunction of names of different sexes. In other words, to the extent that proximity can influence the assessment of acceptance, one might expect that a false female correspondence would be even more acceptable if the female noun was the closest noun to the verb in a conjunction of mixed nouns. In the latencies analysis, there was a significant main effect of sex congruence (F (2.22) = 3.2 to 6.8, mean F = 5.1 (± 0.5), p < 0.05 in 99.7% of cases). T-tests of the matched sample showed that participants were slower in female pairs than in men (t (1.11) = 2.5, p = 0.03). On the other hand, the mixed condition was not significantly different from any of the gender congruent conditions. In fact, in a minority of the analyses performed using the procedure explained above, the p-values were found to be significant (mixed contrast vs. male sex congruent: (t (1.11) = 0.7 to -3.1, mean t = -1.7 (±0.5), p < 05 in 14.7% of cases; Contrast between mixed sex and female sex congruent: (t (1.11) = 0.1 to 3.2, mean t = 2 (± 0.5), p < 0.05 in 40.3% of cases).

The results are summarized in Table 1. Ackema, Peter, Patrick Brandt, Maaike Schoorlemmer & Fred Weerman ed. 2006. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar This is similar to systems with a male-female contrast, except that there is a third gender available, so names with sexless or unspecified sexual references can be masculine, feminine or neutral. There are also some extraordinary names whose gender does not follow the designated gender, such as the German girl, which means « girl », which is neutral. This is because it is actually a diminutive form of « maid » and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neutral. Examples of languages with such a system are later forms of Proto-Indo-European (see below), Sanskrit, some Germanic languages, some Slavic languages, some Romance languages. Marathi, Latin and Greek.

The results observed in Experiment 2 are consistent with those in Experiment 1. This means that the pattern originally observed in Experiment 1 is not due to the fact that participants in this experiment were more likely to produce reactions marked by men than reactions marked by women. In both experiments, gender-specific congruent female and male conditions were the most difficult and simplest, respectively, with the mixed condition being in between. In addition, the same result pattern was observed in error and latencies analyses – although marginally, for latencies, in Experiment 2. It could be argued that the reported trend in response time effects is due to the assumption of the subjects of an intervention strategy. Specifically, it could be that as soon as participants recognized an object with a male noun, they reacted without further treatment of the second object. Thus, as soon as they realized that two objects (instead of one) were presented and that one of them was masculine, they interrupted the further processing of the second object and responded with the plural masculine pronoun. For this reason, the difference between male-congruent and mixed conditions could be explained by the assumption that participants randomly chose which object should be considered first.

However, this argument struggles to explain the trend of results in error rates. This argument would predict that as long as two female objects are identified, the level of precision in relation to the other conditions would not differ. Contrary to this prediction, error rates in the congruent female condition were consistently higher compared to other conditions in both experiments. Names that specifically refer to male people (or animals) are usually men; those that specifically designate women (or animals) are usually females; and names that refer to something that does not have a gender or that does not indicate that the gender of their presenter belongs to one or the other gender, in a way that may seem arbitrary. [11] [12] Examples of languages with such a system are the most modern Romance languages, the Baltic languages, the Celtic languages, the Indo-Aryan languages and the Afro-Asiatic languages. .