Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A central goal of typological research is to characterizelinguistic features in terms of both their functional role andtheir fit to social and cognitive systems. One longstandingpuzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammaticalgender. In an information theoretic analysis of German nounclassification, Dye et al. (2017) enumerated a number ofimportant processing advantages gender confers. Yet thisraises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial toprocessing, what does this mean for languages that make dowithout them? Here, we compare the communicative functionof gender marking in German (a deterministic system) to thatof prenominal adjectives in English (a probabilistic one),finding that despite their differences, both systems act toefficiently smooth information over discourse, making nounsmore equally predictable in context. We examine whyevolutionary pressures may favor one system over another,and discuss the implications for compositional accounts ofmeaning and Gricean principles of communication.