Gender-marked Determiner Research Articles

Grammatical gender selection and the representation of morphemes: The production of Dutch diminutives

In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners. Pictures of simple objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named the pictures using a noun phrase with the appropriate gender-marked determiner. Auditory (Experiment 1) or visual cues (Experiment 2) indicated whether the noun was to be produced in its standard or diminutive form. Results revealed a cost in naming latencies when target and distractor take different determiner forms independent of whether or not they have the same gender. This replicates earlier results showing that congruency effects are due to competition during the selection of determiner forms rather than gender features. The overall pattern of results supports the view that grammatical feature selection is an automatic consequence of lexical node selection and therefore not subject to interference from incongruent grammatical features. Selection of the correct determiner form, however, is a competitive process, implying that lexical node and grammatical feature selection operate with distinct principles.

Spoken word recognition with gender-marked context

In a cross-modal (auditory-visual) fragment priming study in French, we tested the hypothesis that gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine or unefeminine) is used early in the recognition of the following word to discard gender-incongruent competitors. In four experiments, we compared lexical decision performances on targets primed by phonological information only (e.g. /kRa/-CRAPAUD /kRapo/; /to/-TOAD) or by phonological plus gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine /kra/-CRAPAUD; a /to/-TOAD). In all experiments, we found a phonological priming effect that was not modulated by the presence of gender context, whether gender-marked articles were congruent (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or incongruent (Experiment 4) with the target gender. Moreover, phonological facilitation was not modulated by the presence of gender context, whether gender-marked articles allowed exclusion of less frequent competitors (Experiment 1) or more frequent ones (Experiments 2 and 3). We concluded that gender information extracted from a preceding gender-marked determiner is not used early in the process of spoken word recognition and that it may be used in a later selection process.

Dominance affects determiner selection in language production

Janssen and Caramazza (2003) show that when producing diminutives or plurals in Dutch, determiner information about the corresponding (singular) base form is active. This is reflected in a time cost for producing the plural or the diminutive with a gender-marked determiner when these forms and the corresponding singular or base form require different determiners. No such cost is observed when singular and plural or base form and diminutive require the same determiner. In a series of picture naming experiments we show that this competition effect is modulated by the relative dominance of the morphological forms. The results can be explained within an extension of the “primed unitised activation account” proposed by Alario and Caramazza (2002).

Semantic gender assignment regularities in German

Gender assignment relates to a native speaker’s knowledge of the structure of the gender system of his/her language, allowing the speaker to select the appropriate gender for each noun. Whereas categorical assignment rules and exceptional gender assignment are well investigated, assignment regularities, i.e., tendencies in the gender distribution identified within the vocabulary of a language, are still controversial. The present study is an empirical contribution trying to shed light on the gender assignment system native German speakers have at their disposal. Participants presented with a category (e.g., predator) and a pair of gender-marked pseudo-words (e.g., der Trelle vs. die Stisse) preferentially selected the pseudo-word preceded by the gender-marked determiner “associated” with the category (e.g., masculine). This finding suggests that semantic regularities might be part of the gender assignment system of native speakers.

Determiner selection in noun phrase production.

In 3 experiments, native speakers of German named pictures of 1 or 2 objects by producing singular or plural noun phrases consisting of a definite gender-marked determiner and a noun. When singular and plural determiners differed (masculine and neuter gender), naming latencies were longer for plural utterances than for singular utterances. By contrast, when singular and plural determiners were identical (feminine gender), no such effect was obtained. When participants produced bare nouns, the Gender x Number interaction disappeared. This pattern indicates that during the production of plural definite-determiner noun phrases, singular and plural determiners compete for selection. The resulting constraints on number and gender processing in noun phrase production are discussed in the framework of models of language production.

GENDER AGREEMENT IN THE PROCESSING OF SPOKEN FRENCH

The two experiments presented in this paper tested the effects of gender agreement on lexical decisions by presenting grammatically congruent and incongruent noun phrases in different context-target combinations. In the first experiment, a condition in which the target noun was directly preceded by a gender-marked determiner was contrasted with a condition in which an invariable adjective intervened between the determiner and the target. In the second experiment we compared the effects of gender marking in the latter condition with a condition in which both the determiner and the intervening adjective carried an overt gender mark. It was shown first, that lexical decision times to target nouns were longer for incongruent context-target combinations than for a congruent baseline condition. Second, the magnitude of the congruency effect was stronger when the target noun was preceded by a determiner plus an invariable adjective than by a determiner only. Third, the magnitude of the effect did not vary according to whether or not the intervening adjective carried a phonetically realized mark of gender. These results are discussed in terms of the automaticity of syntactic processes, and the crucial role of determiners in setting agreement features for the entire noun phrase when processing languages such as French.