Grammatical gender is a fundamental property of more than half of the world's languages. For example, Spanish has two genders, while Polish has seven, and some African languages exceed ten. In all of them, gender is expressed to varying degrees, but how? Spanish, for instance, is very transparent: many nouns show orthographic and phonological clues "-a" for feminine and "-o" for masculine. However, in other languages like Dutch, the relationship between gender and form is much more opaque, with almost no gender clues. This variability is known as the "gender transparency continuum," where Romance languages occupy the transparent side while others, like Dutch and Norwegian, are on the opaque end.
The transparency of a language has clear consequences for language acquisition in children and adult learners (the more transparent, the faster the acquisition) as well as for language production and comprehension. However, despite gender being an important component influencing the mental processing of a language, there are few studies in this area, possibly due to the fact that the "gender transparency continuum" has only been described qualitatively and lacks a standard definition.
A researcher from CIMCYC, in collaboration with researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the University of Minho, has created a detailed standard description of the factors that contribute to gender transparency, as well as a model that allows for its quantification and, consequently, the making of specific predictions regarding the acquisition, representation, and processing of gender. This model was evaluated with two languages situated at opposite ends of the continuum: Portuguese (transparent) and Dutch (opaque), obtaining the expected values of high transparency and low transparency, respectively.
This research, therefore, allows for the first time to make quantifiable predictions about gender, opening the possibility of advancing research in this field.
Full reference: Sá-Leite, A. R., Simpson, I. C., Fraga, I. & Comesaña, M. (2024). A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages. Acta Psychologica, 246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104236