Syntactic or semantic gender agreement in Dutch, German, and German learner Dutch. A speeded grammaticality judgement task

Dutch is currently undergoing a ‘resemanticisation’ of its pronominal gender, in which syntactic agreement is replaced with a system in which pronouns are chosen in accordance with the degree of individuation of the antecedent. Cur-rent accounts of resemanticisation link the process to the extent to which the three-way nominal gender distinctions are still entrenched. Using experimental data gathered with speeded grammaticality judgements from speakers of both Netherlandic and Belgian varieties of Dutch, of German, and of German learners of Dutch, we unambiguously relate the rise of semantic agreement in Dutch to an increased uncertainty with respect to grammatical gender. In addition, reaction time measurements suggest that an agreement system with a strong propensity towards grammatical agreement allows for faster processing of agreement rela-tions than systems in which semantic agreement plays a larger role