Semantic coherence in noun class assignment: an experimental investigation of isiXhosa

Abstract

A central question in research on grammatical gender is whether it is semantically meaningful. This paper employs an auditory lexical decision task to investigate the role of noun class (NC) semantic coherence in judgments of novel NC marker + noun stem combinations in isiXhosa. Ninety participants made lexical decisions to pseudowords created by placing an NC prefix from a more (NC4) and less (NC10) semantically coherent NC on noun stems belonging to another class (“semantic violation items”). Responses to these pseudowords were compared to another condition in which the NC prefix was placed on a verb stem (“syntactic violation items”). While NC4 pseudowords were rejected equally robustly in the syntactic and semantic violation conditions, responses in the two conditions differed significantly for NC10, where rejection rates were lower for putative semantic violation items than syntactic violation items. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that some noun classes are associated with semantic generalisations while others are not.