Processing of Grammatical Gender in Normal and Aphasic Speakers of Russian

Abstract

Sensitivity to grammatical gender was investigated in 22 Russian-speaking aphasic patients, compared with young controls. Experiment 1 used a cued shadowing paradigm to assess gender priming (facilitation and/or inhibition of lexical access by a prenominal modifier with congruent, incongruent or neutral gender). Experiment 2 used a grammaticality judgment paradigm with similar stimuli. Normals showed significant interactions between gender and priming in Experiment 1 (facilitation for feminine and neuter nouns but not for masculines) and Experiment 2 (larger effects of context on feminine and neuter nouns) that we interpret as a Markedness Effect. Patients showed significant priming in Experiment 1 and above-chance accuracy in Experiment 2, but failed to show reduced effects for the least-marked masculine gender (the Markedness Effect) in either experiment. Context effects were not related to specific aphasic symptoms or subtypes in either experiment. However, canonical correlation revealed differential effects of specific aphasic symptoms on judgment accuracy (false alarms vs. misses). We conclude that knowledge of grammatical gender is spared in Russian aphasics, but gender processing is deviant. A possible model to account for these differences is discussed.

Left cytoarchitectonic BA 44 processes syntactic gender violations in determiner phrases

“…Evidence for gender priming comes from the previous studies of language production [e.g. Akhutina et al, 2001;Deutsch et al, 1999;Schriefers et al, 1998] and comprehension [e.g. Boelte and Connine, 2004;Colé and Segui, 1994;Friederici and Jacobsen, 1999;Grosjean et al, 1994;Hartmann, 2004].…”

Comprehension and production of movement-derived sentences by Russian speakers with agrammatic aphasia

“…The agrammatic participants in this study had difficulties rejecting these ungrammatical sentences, in comparison to the control subjects. Several studies show that Slavic-speaking agrammatic aphasics are sensitive to the morphology of case and gender agreement, and transitive verb subcategorization (Akhutina et al, 2001;Lukatela, Crain, & Shankweiler, 1988;Milekic et al, 1995;Smith & Bates, 1987; but see Luria, 1975 for findings on difficulties in grammaticality judgment of sentences with ungrammaticality is related to case agreement, tense and gender). Smith and Mimica (1984) tested the role of morphosyntactic cues in agrammatic comprehension, and found that although speakers of Serbo-Croatian with agrammatism are relatively sensitive to case morphology, their ability to use these cues for comprehension is poorer than that of the control participants.…”

Reaching the end point and stopping midway: different scenarios in the acquisition of Russian

“…Gender mismatches and matches lend themselves to rather easy experimental testing which could be conducted even with young children. It would be particularly beneficial to conduct experiments on the acquisition of gender given some recent work on gender processing in Russian (Ahutina et al 2001;Taraban, Kempe 1999). In the former work, we showed that Russian listeners can exploit gender agreement cues on-line, helping them to predict the identity of an upcoming word.…”