Linear Order in Language: an Error-Driven Learning Account

Learners of German often struggle with learning the grammatical gender of nouns and their correct articles, for example, that it should be “die Gabel” (the fork) and not “der Gabel”. Why is this so hard? And why do gender systems even exist?

I taught participants differently structured artificial languages and found that it is especially difficult to learn a gender system, when gender is marked before the noun (e.g., in German: “die Gabel”, the fork, vs. “der Löffel”, the spoon) as compared to when gender is marked after the noun (e.g., in Albanian: “pirun-i”, the fork, vs. “lug-a”, the spoon). With computational simulations I could show that this effect arises because human learning is sensitive to the order of words.

However, while gendered articles are hard to learn, they can facilitate communication because they can make following nouns more predictable and therefore easier to process: for example, after the German article “der”, “Löffel” is quite likely, “Gabel”, however, is very unlikely to follow. This is a function that gendered suffixes, as in Albanian, or genderless articles, as in English, cannot fulfill. In a language production study, I observed that speakers produce more articles that can make following nouns predictable, such as German articles, than articles that cannot fulfill this function, such as the English article “the”.

I conclude that the order in which gender is marked in languages affects language learning as well as communication. This makes German gender hard to learn but useful for communication.