Arab linguists have distinguished between the animate and inanimate gender of nouns, where the former was assigned a male or female natural gender and the later a grammatical gender, and so the distinction between the real natural gender and the figurative grammatical gender has spread widely in Arabic grammar. Educational studies and linguistic research carried out by educationalists and linguists have indicated the prevalence of two difficulties in teaching and learning the issue of grammatical gender. The first is related to distinguishing between masculine and feminine within the same sex; the other is related to the multiplicities in the structural forms of gender whether natural or grammatical This research focuses on the first difficulty as this difficulty reflects directly on the second difficulty whether right or wrong. This can be observed in the intensive grammatical agreement in topics such as verb – subject, subject - predicate, modified - modifier, and number agreement.
Experience and grammatical agreement: Statistical learning shapes number agreement production