On the use of the grammatical gender of anaphoric pronouns in German. A comparison between Finns and Germans

Abstract

Summary: The paper investigates the processing of grammatical gender in German. Finnish subjects regularly show problems in using pronominal gender in English or German second-language speech production. This may be due to the fact that there is no grammatical gender in Finnish. Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that Finns are in general unable to use the information contained in the grammatical gender of personal pronouns. The results show that Germans use both semantic and syntactic information in the processing of personal pronouns while Finns apparently only use semantic gender information. This simplified processing of gender leads to a greater tendency to make mistakes when using German as a foreign language.