1003: Benefits of Gender (g.w.4) Sep 7, 2017

If, as has been said in the last few days here, that gender is fairly arbitrary and also has the potential to complicate things, there may not seem to be any use for it. That is not to say every aspect of every grammar has to be reasonable—there is not a reason why some languages rely on word-order to indicate syntax while others use inflection—but at least in that case there needs to be some way to show how the words relate to each other, whereas there does not need to be gender: three quarters of the world's languages do not have it at all. Still, at least one of the possible benefits to grammatical gender is recognition of words. In the paper, Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition [1] written by Casey Lew-Williams and Anne Fernald, it was discussed that children learning Spanish were better able to identify referents when they were given the morphosyntactic cue, and native-speaking adults showed similar results as well. They said "studies show that adults respond more rapidly to nouns preceded by valid cues to grammatical gender than without such cues" [1]. Although it is not necessary to have gender to identify words—otherwise all languages would have gender—there are advantages when it comes to recognition at least.

[1] Lew-Williams, Casey, and Anne Fernald. “Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition.” Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 3, 2007, pp. 193–198. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40064714.