The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition

Abstract

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking-masculine or feminine-that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved-lexical or syntactic.

On the Inseparability of Grammar and the Lexicon: Evidence from Acquisition, Aphasia and Real-time Processing

“…This includes effects of gender priming on lexical decision and gating in French (Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillelmon, & Besson, 1994), on word repetition and gender classi-fication in Italian , and on picture naming in Spanish (Reyes, 1995) and German (Hillert & Bates, 1996; but see van Berkum, 1996, andFriederici &Schriefers (1994) for reports indicating that gender priming may be relatively fragile in German and Dutch). Studies of lexical decision in Serbo-Croatian provide evidence for both gender and case priming, with real-word and nonword primes that carry morphological markings that are either congruent or incongruent with the target word (Gurjanov, Lukatela, Moskovljevic, & Turvey, 1985;Lukatela, Kostic, Feldman, & Turvey, 1983).…”

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

“…However, several studies have also reported facilitative priming effects of gender. For example, gender facilitation was observed for word pairs in French using gating and auditory lexical decision (Grosjean et al, 1994) and in Italian and Russian (Akhutina et al, 1999) using cued shadowing. In these studies, the gender of a word facilitated its retrieval relative to words that provided no gender information.…”

“…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;…”

Expecting Gender: An Event Related Brain Potential Study on the Role of Grammatical Gender in Comprehending a Line Drawing Within a Written Sentence in Spanish

“…And, indeed, empirical results from a variety of tasks suggest a number of ways in which gender information might facilitate decisions about, or processing of, pictures and words. Gender markings on a noun have been shown to expedite its recognition (Grosjean et al, 1994;Bates et al, 1995;Radeau and van Berkum, 1996). Lexical decisions for nouns are speeded by the prior occurrence of an article or adjective that agrees with it in gender (Gurjanov, 1985;Lukatela et al, 1987;Jakubowicz and Faussart, 1998).…”