Speaker's gender may affect how quickly and accurately we understand words

Researchers have provided evidence about the sex of a speaker affecting how quickly listeners identified words grammatically.

Based on the fact that Spanish words have a grammatical gender - words ending in "o" are typically masculine and in "a" are typically feminine - the researchers showed that the sex of a speaker affected how fast and accurately listeners could identify a list of Spanish words as masculine or feminine.

When there was a mismatch between the sex of the speaker and the gender of the word, listeners slowed down in identifying the word grammatically and were less accurate. Both the speakers and listeners were native Spanish speakers.

Michael Vitevitch, University of Kansas professor of psychology, said Grammar and syntax have been thought for decades to be automatic and untouchable by other brain processes.

Everything else - the sex of the speaker, their dialect, etc. - is stripped away as our brains process the sound signal of a word and store it as an abstract form.

Vitevich said that their study shows that all that other information does influence not just word recognition processing, but higher-level processes associated with grammar.

Vitevitch said that while linguists and psychologists have debated whether memory is abstract or exemplar, he believes that there is evidence for both.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.