The Role of Suffixes in Grammatical Gender Assignment in Modern Greek: A Psycholinguistic Study

The aim of this study is to investigate how native speakers of Greek assign gender to nouns. The main question concerns the role that the morphophonological information encoded on noun suffixes plays in the assignment of gender values by native speakers. To that end, novel nouns were created combined with the different nominal suffixes so that the role of the suffix could be investigated independently of any lexical and/or semantic effects. Monolingual, native speakers of Greek were asked to use these novel nouns by providing an agreeing definite article thus indicating the corresponding gender value. The experiment was conducted both orally and in written form, so that potential effects of phonological as opposed to orthographic information could be examined. Following the experiment, probability values (predictive values) were calculated for each noun suffix based on the participants' interpretations, which were then compared to counts of frequency co-occurrence of each suffix with each gender value in the language. The results are discussed with respect to theoretical models of gender assignment and lexical access, while lexicalist approaches to morphology are also addressed.