Abstract: There are mainly two types of gender agreement features for most of world’s languages, which are grammatical gender and semantic/biological gender. These two types of gender features show different sensitivities to syntactic as well as semantic aspects of constraints; the processes of acquiring these two agreement systems are different and the corresponding neuro-physiological mechanisms underlying these two processes are only partially overlapped. Moreover, these two gender agreement features take different positions in the agreement hierarchies: it is located in a lower position in the morphsyntactically-based agreement hierarchy (e.g., person > grammatical number > grammatical gender) whereas a higher position in the semantically-based hierarchy (e.g., person > semantic gender > notional number).

Key words: grammatical gender, semantic gender, agreement hierarchy, ERP, fMRI