Gender comes first: Experimental evidence for the representation of gender closer to the noun stem than number across linguistic populations

Languages exhibit a tremendous amount of variation in how they organise and order morphemes within words; however, regularities are also found. For example, gender and number inflectional morphology tend to appear together within a single affix. In the relatively rare cases in which they appear as two separate affixes, morphology encoding gender information tends to be placed closer to the stem than number morphology is. Alternative theories of gender and number have been designed (in part) to explain these tendencies. However, the typological data are very sparse, making it difficult to find clear evidence for the representations and mechanisms shaping the organisation of gender and number. Across a series of experiments, we use an artificial language learning paradigm to explore the inferences learners make about the order of gender and number affixes in the absence of any explicit information in the input. We show that language learners have a clear preference for placing nominal morphology containing gender information closest to the stem. This holds both for prefixing and suffixing morphology, and across different types of gender and number systems. Importantly, these biases are consistent across populations of participants with different L1 experience with gender morphology: English, Italian and Kîîtharaka speakers. These results provide a new source of empirical support for particular theories of gender, and in line with previous work, suggest that cognitive biases play a role in determining morpheme order in the world’s languages.