Spanish Gender Assignment in an Analogical Framework

The focus of the study is two-fold: 1) to determine how much phonemic material must be considered in predicting nominal gender in Spanish; 2) to determine if gender assignment can be considered an analogical process. A database of Spanish nouns extracted from a frequency dictionary serves as the database for the present study, while the phonemic make up and syllable structure of the penultimate rime and final syllable serve as the variables. A number of analogical simulations using the Analogical Modeling of Language algorithm demonstrate that phonemic material from as far back as the penultimate rime may aid in gender assignment. Analogy is also shown to closely mirror Spanish speakers’ intuitions regarding the gender of unknown words. Gender assignment errors made by children also fall out of the analogical architecture. 1