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The use of Grammatical Gender in Predictive language comprehension: Evidence from Young and Older adults

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Prediction-by-association, in which a word pre-activates lexically associated words, is thought to be relatively automatic and therefore spared in healthy aging. In languages with grammatical gender, however, prenominal modifiers carry both semantic and gender information, so it remains unclear whether older adults also use morphosyntactic agreement to anticipate upcoming words. We tested whether younger (n = 32, 20–35 years) and older (n = 31, 55–75 years) native Hindi speakers use the meaning and the gender marking of a prenominal adjective to anticipate an upcoming noun. In a visual-world eye-tracking task, participants heard sentences such as Abhi aap ek nukili wali sui dekhenge ('Now you will see a pointed needle') while viewing a target (needle), an adjective competitor that was semantically compatible with the adjective but mismatched its gender (spear), and two unrelated distractors. In both age groups, the target and the adjective competitor attracted comparable anticipatory fixations shortly after the adjective onset, and both were fixated more than the distractors. Later in the pre-noun interval, fixations to the target began to exceed those to the gender-mismatching competitor, although this advantage was modest. None of these effects interacted with age group, and filler sentences without a predictive adjective elicited no anticipatory fixations. These findings suggest that early anticipation is driven primarily by lexical-semantic association, with grammatical gender constraining predictions somewhat later, and that neither source of information shows age-related decline in contextually simple sentences.Keywords: prediction; aging; grammatical gender; visual world paradigm; eye-tracking; Hindi
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/rf9ku_v1
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7223267244
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