During short excursions away from home, some mammals are known to update their position with respect to their point of departure through path integration (dead reckoning) by processing internal (idiothetic) signals generated by rotations and translations. Path integration (PI) is a continuously ongoing process in which errors accumulate. To remain functional over longer excursions, PI needs to be reset through position information from stable external references. We tested the homing behaviour of golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus W.) during hoarding excursions following a rotation of the arena and nest. In continuous darkness, the hamsters returned to their point of departure at the rotated nest, and therefore depended on PI only. In other trials, the animals were briefly presented with visual room cues during or at the end of the outward trip, visual cues being pitted by 67°or 98°against the animal's current selfgenerated position vector. After a fix, the animals headed for the usual (unrotated) nest location, as defined by room cues, independent of the timing of the fix. These results were obtained in two different geometrical settings and showed that, after the fix, the animals update their position, and not merely their head direction or internal compass, in a new reference frame. Thus, episodic fixes on familiar external references reset the PI and therefore greatly enhance the functional signification of navigation that is based on feedback information from locomotion.

Using a word association paradigm we examined the extent to which readers can overcome the specific interpretation of the grammatical masculine form in French when instructed to embrace its generic meaning. In two experiments participants were to decide whether a person introduced by a kinship term (e.g. aunt) could be part of a group represented by a role name (e.g. musicians). After the completion of the first half of the experiment, participants were explicitly reminded about the generic interpretation and use of the masculine form. Although the reminder resulted in some level of generic interpretation, there were still strong traces of the specific interpretation in the response times, regardless of participants' inhibition capacities (Experiment 1). Adding a supplementary constraint by exposing readers to distractor role names in feminine forms (Experiment 2) did not reveal any different effects.The results indicated that although readers can be motivated to elaboratively activate the generic interpretation of the masculine form, the latter can not completely overrule a more passively activated specific one. <164 words>

Using a preferential looking paradigm, the current study examined the role that grammatical gender plays when preschool French-speaking toddlers process role nouns in the masculine form (e.g.,chanteursmasculine‘singers’). While being auditorily prompted with “Look at the ‘a role noun’!”, two- and three-year-olds were presented with two pictures of two characters (‘boy–boy’ versus ‘girl–boy’) with attributes of the given role noun (e.g., singers with microphone and music notes). All role nouns were presented in the masculine plural form, which, despite its use to refer to mixed-gender groups, can be interpreted as referring to men. We expected toddlers to be biased by stereotypes, yet when non-stereotypical role nouns were presented, toddlers were not influenced by grammatical gender, but by their own sex (even more so for three-year-old toddlers). The absence of sensitivity to grammatical cues for either age group is discussed in terms of the developmental awareness of grammatical gender.

The literature reports some contradictory results on the degree of phonological specificity of infants’ early lexical representations in the Romance language, French, and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether these discrepancies are because of differences in method, in language characteristics, or in participants’age. In this study, we examined whether 12- and 17-month-old Frenchspeaking infants are able to distinguish well-pronounced from mispronounced words (one or two features of their initial consonant). To this end, 46 infants participated in a preferential looking experiment in which they were presented with pairs of pictures together with a spoken word well pronounced or mispronounced. The results show that both 12- and 17-month-old infants look longer at the pictures corresponding to well-pronounced words than to mispronounced words, but show no difference between the two mispronunciation types. These results suggest that, as early as 12 months, French-speaking infants, like those exposed to Germanic languages, already possess detailed phonological representations of familiar words

In French, and other gender marked languages, there are two ways to interpret a grammatical masculine form when used to refer to social roles or occupations [e.g., les magiciens (the magicians masculine )]. It can refer to a group composed of only men (specific use of the masculine form), or one composed of both women and men (generic use). Studies of adults revealed that the rule that masculine forms can be interpreted as inclusive of either gender is not readily applied. To gain a better understanding of the processes shaping this phenomenon, we present a follow-up study ( N = 52) to Lévy et al. (2016) to explore how French-speaking kindergarten children (3–5 years of age) resolve the semantic ambiguity of the grammatical masculine form when presented with role or occupation nouns. In a paradigm where participants’ gazes were monitored, children were presented with pictures of a pair of two boys and a pair of one girl and one boy and were prompted to Look at the [role noun masculine plural form ] . First, the results suggest a stereotype effect in that children more strongly directed their gaze toward the boy-boy picture for stereotypical male role nouns, but toward the girl-boy picture for stereotypical female role nouns. Second, in the non-stereotypical/neutral condition we did not find an indication of any own-sex preference (as in Lévy et al., 2016 ), but of an influence of the role nouns’ grammatical gender, in that children more strongly directed their gaze toward boy-boy pictures than toward girl-boy pictures. We suggest that a specific interpretation of masculine forms might already start to emerge between 3 and 5 years of age, while gender stereotypes are still activated.