On gender assignment

Can gender assignment be considered an analogical process?
I thought I should share the following which are two thought provoking articles on the role of intuition in gender assignment in Spanish:
Native speaker intuitions as a basis for determining noun gender rules in Spanish. by Diana Natalicio available at the Southwest Journal of Linguistics and the article: "Spanish Gender Assignment in an Analogical Framework" by David Eddington

Also, from our class discussion questions/comments : While it makes sense that terminal phonemes play a part in the assignment of gender to English-origin borrowings, I am surprised that the phonology of the words in other aspects apparently does not have much influence on assignment, especially in the case of similarly pronounced synonyms. It seems to me that a Spanish speaker who regularly says el aeropuerto might, in English, be primed to say el airport, since the words begin in a phonetically similar way. Similarly, someone who says la electricidad might say la electricity.