Gender and lexical access in Italian

Abstract

Two new procedures were employed to investigate the effects of semantic and grammatical gender on lexical access in Italian and to investigate the interaction of gender with other factors that are known to influence lexical access in other languages. The gender-monitoring task requires a conscious decision about the gender of each noun, whereas the word repetition task does not require explicit attention to gender. In both tasks, single words are presented out of context, under speeded conditions. Both procedures proved to be sensitive indices of word recognition, with reaction times that are closely tied to the point at which words can be uniquely identified (although some processing before and after the uniqueness point was seen). In both tasks, reaction times were strongly affected by phonological factors (e.g., length, number of syllables, and presence of frication on the initial consonant). Phonological transparency of gender marking had a reliable effect on gender monitoring but had no effect on word repetition, suggesting that explicit attention to gender may be a factor affecting utilization of this phonological cue. Semantic factors (including semantic gender) had no effect on performance. Frequency and age of acquisition had very small effects when other factors were controlled. Implications for current models of lexical access are discussed, with special reference to the role of gender.Gender marking is a pervasive phenomenon in many of the world's languages, but its role in lexical and grammatical processing is still poorly understood. In most of the languages that incorporate some form of productive gender marking, the relationship between grammatical and semantic gender is indirect at best. To offer one widely cited example (e.g., Maratsos, 1981), who can explain why, in the German language, the term for the flute (die Fldte] is This research was supported by NIDCD Grant PHS DC00216-09 to E.B., and by a grant from the Clinica e Centro di Ricerca Santa Lucia to L.P.During manuscript preparation, E.B. was a visiting scholar at the Istituto di Psicologia, Consiglio Nazionale di Ricerca, in laboratories directed by Virginia Volterra at the Istituto Statale Sordo-Muti, Via Nomentana 56, Rome, Italy. We are grateful to Bob Buffington, Larry Juarez, and Meiti Opie for assistance in stimulus preparation and data collection, to Angela Friederici and Michele Kail for advice and criticism in the design phases of this study, and to Uli Frauenfelder and William Marslen-Wilson for their advice and criticism during analysis and manuscript preparation. Any errors of design or interpretation that remain are, of course, our own. Please address correspondence to E. Bates, Center for Research in Language 0526, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0526. feminine, whereas the term for the little girl (das Mddchen) is neuter? Or why the term for the ocean is neuter in German (das Meer), feminine in French (la mer), and masculine in Italian (it mare'[l) If gender serves no systematic semantic functio...

The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition

“…Furthermore, the effect needs to be studied in other gender-carrying languages. Preliminary research on German and Italian (Bates et al, 1994;Friederici & Schriefers, 1993) shows a gender effect, but this does not seem to be the case in Dutch (Berkum, personal communication, 1993). Finally, it will be interesting to study how bilinguals use gender information during lexical access when one of their languages does not have gender marking and the other does, or when both oftheir languages carry gender marking but sometimes give contradictory markings, such as feminine "die Vase" (the vase) in German and masculine "le vase" in French, or masculine "el cacahuete" in Spanish and feminine "la cacahuete" in French.…”

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

“…Researchers have used the gender of nouns to investigate word retrieval and word production (e.g., Akhutina, Kurgansky, Polinsky, & Bates, 1999;Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996;Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, Damico, & Hernandez, 1995;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, & Bates, 1999;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, Wicha, & Bates, 2003;Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, & Guillelmon, 1994;Jacobsen, 1999;van Berkum, 1997;Vigliocco & Franck, 1999;Vigliocco, Lauer, Damian, & Levelt, 2002;Vigliocco, Vinson, Indefrey, Levelt, & Hellwig, 2004;Vigliocco & Zilli, 1999), cohort activation in word recognition (e.g., Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2000), processing differences between pictures and words (e.g., Bowers, Vigliocco, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Vinson, 1999), the relative timing of syntactic and phonological processes during lexical access (e.g., Schmitt, Rodriguez-Fornells, Kutas, & Munte, 2001a;Schmitt, Schiltz, Zaake, Kutas, & Munte, 2001b;van Turennout, Hagoort, & Brown, 1998) and the interplay between discourse, semantic, and syntactic level processes (e.g., Brown, van Berkum, & Hagoort, 2000;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;Deutsch, Bentin, & Katz, 1999;Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000;Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997;Hagoort, 2003;van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort, 1999;Wicha, 2002;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2000). Recent studies have also provided electrophysiological evidence for the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement during sentence comprehension (e.g., Brown et al, 2000;Demestre, Meltzer, Garcia-Albea, & Vigil, 1999;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;…”

Diminutivization supports gender acquisition in Russian children

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