How do Spanish noun genders affect sentence structure

Spanish noun genders affect sentence structure primarily through gender agreement, which influences articles, adjectives, pronouns, and sometimes verbs within a sentence. Spanish has masculine and feminine noun genders, and these genders require agreement with other sentence elements — for example, the article “el” pairs with masculine nouns, while “la” pairs with feminine nouns. Adjectives and pronouns must also match the noun gender in both gender and number.

This gender agreement shapes sentence structure by imposing morphological markers that signal the gender of the noun, guiding both comprehension and production. For instance, a masculine noun will be accompanied by masculine modifiers and sometimes trigger masculine verb forms in certain constructions, while feminine nouns follow their corresponding feminine markers.

Research also shows that native Spanish speakers process gender information quickly and use it to anticipate upcoming words in sentences. The masculine gender has a cognitive bias as the unmarked or default form when a group contains mixed gender, affecting interpretation and agreement choices.

In sum, Spanish noun gender affects sentence structure by enforcing agreement rules that connect nouns with articles, adjectives, pronouns, and occasionally verbs, thus creating a grammatical network that is sensitive to masculine and feminine distinctions and influences sentence comprehension and production. ^{4, 12, 16, 19}

References

• Do gender stereotypes bias the processing of morphological innovations? The case of gender-inclusive language in Spanish

• The Interplay of Relational and Non-relational Processes in Sentence Production: The Case of Relative Clause Planning in Japanese and Spanish

• Morphosyntactic stereotypes of speakers with different genders and sexual orientations: an experimental investigation

• The interpretation of Spanish masculine plural NPs: Are they perceived as uniformly masculine or as a mixture of masculine and feminine?

• A Spanish matrix sentence test for assessing speech reception thresholds in noise

• Processing of pronouns with gender-inclusive –x in Spanish: An eye-tracking study

• Grammatical gender processing in romance languages: Evidence from bare noun production in Italian and Spanish

• Language control in bilingual production: Insights from error rate and error type in sentence production

• When unpleasantness meets feminines: a behavioural study on gender agreement and emotionality.

• Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production

• Revisiting Masculine and Feminine Grammatical Gender in Spanish: Linguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Neurolinguistic Evidence

• Anticipating Words and Their Gender: An Event-related Brain Potential Study of Semantic Integration, Gender Expectancy, and Gender Agreement in Spanish Sentence Reading

• Gender Congruency Effects in Spanish: Behavioral Evidence from Noun Phrase Production

• Gender Congruency Effects in Spanish: Behavioral Evidence from Noun Phrase Production

• Revisiting Masculine and Feminine Grammatical Gender in Spanish: Linguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Neurolinguistic Evidence

• Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition

• Quantifying the Semantic Core of Gender Systems

• Potato not Pope: human brain potentials to gender expectation and agreement in Spanish spoken sentences

• Brain potentials reveal differential processing of masculine and feminine grammatical gender in native Spanish speakers.

• A Fork in the Road: Grammatical Gender Assignment to Nouns in Spanish Dialects