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

Abstract

This study investigates the contribution of grammatical gender to integrating depicted nouns into sentences during on-line comprehension, and whether semantic congruity and gender agreement interact using two tasks: naming and semantic judgement of pictures. Native Spanish speakers comprehended spoken Spanish sentences with an embedded line drawing, which replaced a noun that either made sense or not with the preceding sentence context and either matched or mismatched the gender of the preceding article. In Experiment 1a (picture naming) slower naming times were found for gender mismatching pictures than matches, as well as for semantically incongruous pictures than congruous ones. In addition, the effects of gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted; specifically, pictures that were both semantically incongruous and gender mismatching were named slowest, but not as slow as if adding independent delays from both violations. Compared with a neutral baseline, with pictures embedded in simple command sentences like "Now please say ____", both facilitative and inhibitory effects were observed. Experiment 1b replicated these results with low-cloze gender-neutral sentences, more similar in structure and processing demands to the experimental sentences. In Experiment 2, participants judged a picture's semantic fit within a sentence by button-press; gender agreement and semantic congruity again interacted, with gender agreement having an effect on congruous but not incongruous pictures. Two distinct effects of gender are hypothesised: a "global" predictive effect (observed with and without overt noun production), and a "local" inhibitory effect (observed only with production of gender-discordant nouns).

Effects in production of word pre-activation during listening: Are listener-generated predictions specified at a speech-sound level?

“…Pictures are named fastest in a congruent context, more slowly in a neutral context, and most slowly in an incongruent context. This pattern has been interpreted as indicating (prediction-mediated) easing of integration (Griffin & Bock, 1998;Wicha et al 2005). Of course, the effect is also consistent with a prediction-asproduction account.…”

“…Previous studies concerning the effect of sentence-stem context on picture naming have investigated integration rather than prediction effects, and have therefore focused on the effects of manipulating the semantic and/ or syntactic congruence between the sentence-stem and the picture name (e.g., Roe, Jahn-Samilo, Juarez, Mickel, Royer, & Bates, 2000; see also Griffin & Bock, 1998;Wicha et al 2005). Pictures are named fastest in a congruent context, more slowly in a neutral context, and most slowly in an incongruent context.…”

The Tick-Tock of Language: Is Language Processing Sensitive to Circadian Rhythmicity and Elevated Sleep Pressure?

“…Thus, gender priming effects are described as a syntactic congruency check that takes less time for a gender-congruent element than for a gender-incongruent element. An alternative view assumes gender information is not checked postlexically but that there is a prelexical activation of the corresponding noun and, consequently, the search space in the mental lexicon is reduced (Wicha et al, 2005). However, the computational costs involved in preactivating all gender-matching nouns in a lexicon would be rather high, as the set of lexical items would be very large (O'Seaghdha, 1997;Tannenhaus et al, 1987).…”

“…Interestingly, gender plays a facilitating role in sentence processing because gender increases the cohesion of a sentence (Desrochers, 1986). In addition, gender cues may facilitate the recognition of words (Wicha et al, 2005), and gender can sometimes disambiguate homophones (Van Berkum, 1996). In languages that have gender agreement, incongruent gender marking usually slows the processing of the following noun relative to a congruent marking.…”

Structural priming: A critical review.

“…Moreover, syntactic priming is also used to refer to the facilitatory effects of a syntactically congruent context on lexical processing (e.g., Deutsch & Bentin, 1994;Wicha et al, 2005;Wright & Garrett, 1984). We also avoid the term syntactic persistence (Bock, 1986) because not all structural priming effects involve perseveration (e.g., Smith & Wheeldon, 2001).…”