The neuropsychology of grammatical gender: An introduction

Six contributions form the special section that Cortex devoted to the neurospcyhology of grammatical gender processing. First, the evidence on grammatical gender retrieval and production provided by these studies concern both unimpaired and language-impaired speakers (namely, aphasics and Alzheimer patients). Second, the authors investigated gender processing in a fairly wide range of languages, namely Semitic languages (i.e., Hebrew), Romance languages (i.e., Spanish and Italian), Slavic languages (i.e., Polish) and Germanic languages (i.e., Dutch and German).Third, different methodologies are employed to tap either comprehension or production processes: on-line tasks such as visual lexical decision making and self-paces reading, off-line tasks such as grammaticality judgement, and picture naming. Lastly, although the focus of this special section of Cortex is on grammatical gender, some of these studies deal with the relationships and processing differences between gender and another relevant syntactic feature,number.