Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task.

Ana Rita Sá-Leite,Montserrat Comesaña,Juan Haro,Isabel Fraga

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661175

Abstract

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al., 2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization.

Highlights

In European Portuguese (EP), the nouns “mesa” and “castor” share a characteristic that is not present in other nouns such as “gato”: the first two have grammatical gender, but the latter has what is called natural gender
Different linear models were created to examine the effect of the variables of interest and their interactions on inverse response times (RTs) (−1000/RT)
The random structure was stepwise simplified by removing in each step the effect that explained the smallest proportion of the variance, starting from the most complex model, until a convergent model with at least one critical effect on the random slopes was obtained

Summary

Introduction

In European Portuguese (EP), the nouns “mesa” (table) and “castor” (beaver) share a characteristic that is not present in other nouns such as “gato” (cat): the first two have grammatical gender, but the latter has what is called natural gender. Grammatical gender encompasses nouns across the complete hierarchical continuum of animacy, but natural gender is restricted to animate nouns In this sense, nouns with grammatical gender such as inanimates “mesa” and “relógio,” or animates “castor,” “macaco” (beaver, monkey, both masculine [M]) and “cegonha,” “zebra” (stork, zebra, both feminine [F]) take an inherent gender value which is immovable and cannot be replaced. Nouns with grammatical gender such as inanimates “mesa” and “relógio,” or animates “castor,” “macaco” (beaver, monkey, both masculine [M]) and “cegonha,” “zebra” (stork, zebra, both feminine [F]) take an inherent gender value which is immovable and cannot be replaced This intrinsic gender (Corrêa et al, 2011) is often described as an arbitrary lexical-syntactic characteristic of nouns (Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999), since it has no semantic or form implications for nouns themselves. By virtue of the gender value they adopt, they modify their own form via gender morphemes (e.g., “o gato” [the male cat] and “a gata” [the female cat])

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