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Schriefers, Herbert; Jescheniak, Jörg D.

doi:10.1023/a:1023264810403

Cited by 78 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Though phonological and semantic regularities exist that highly correlate with gender in German (e.g., Köpcke and Zubin, 1984; Schwichtenberg and Schiller, 2004; Zubin and Köpcke, 2009), gender is not fully predictable by such features. Therefore, a word's gender is assumed to be stored in the mental lexicon, as an inherent property of the lexical specification of nouns (see Levelt, 1989; Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999). As in English, the rightmost constituent of German compounds is the morphological/morpho-syntactic head, which determines syntactic features including grammatical gender (e.g., Williams, 1981).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantically Transparent and Opaque Compounds in German Noun-Phrase Production: Evidence for Morphemes in Speaking

Lorenz

Zwitserlood

2016

Front. Psychol.

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This study examines the lexical representation and processing of noun-noun compounds and their grammatical gender during speech production in German, a language that codes for grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Using a picture-word interference paradigm, participants produced determiner-compound noun phrases in response to pictures, while ignoring written distractor words. Compound targets were either semantically transparent (e.g., birdhouse) or opaque (e.g., hotdog), and their constituent nouns either had the same or a different gender (internal gender match). Effects of gender-congruent but otherwise unrelated distractor nouns, and of two morphologically related distractors corresponding to the first or second constituent were assessed relative to a completely unrelated, gender-incongruent distractor baseline. Both constituent distractors strongly facilitated compound naming, and these effects were independent of the targets' semantic transparency. This supports retrieval of constituent morphemes for semantically transparent and opaque compounds during speech production. Furthermore, gender congruency between compounds and distractors did not speed up naming in general, but interacted with gender match of the compounds' constituent nouns, and their semantic transparency. A significant gender-congruency effect was obtained with semantically transparent compounds, consisting of two constituent nouns of the same gender, only. In principle, this pattern is compatible with a multiple lemma representation account for semantically transparent, but not for opaque compounds. The data also fit with a more parsimonious, holistic representation for all compounds at the lemma level, when differences in co-activation patterns for semantically transparent and opaque compounds are considered.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantically Transparent and Opaque Compounds in German Noun-Phrase Production: Evidence for Morphemes in Speaking

Lorenz

Zwitserlood

2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…Hence, it is necessary to try to understand their representational characteristics separately. In the case of grammatical gender, this is particularly important because, as Corbett (1991, p. 1) noted, it is Bthe most puzzling of the grammatical categories.T he complexity of grammatical gender is visible in its short but rich definition: it is described as an arbitrary, abstract property of nouns, being both lexical and syntactic, that is present in every language that has a gender system (Schriefers & Jescheniak, 1999). A gender system classifies words according to different categories or classes called gender values (Corbett, 1991).…”

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confidence: 99%

Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review

2019

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In this review article, we analyze how grammatical gender is represented and processed in the bilingual mind. To that end, we review the data from 13 existing behavioral studies of mainly late second language (L2) learners on the so-called gender congruency (GC) effect (facilitated processing for translation equivalents with the same gender, in comparison to those with a different gender) in L2 production and comprehension. The majority of the results showed a GC effect, regardless of the type of language involved. However, the state of cognateness of the target nouns, as well as the similarity between the gender systems of the bilingual speakers and their L2 proficiency, modulated the results. Interestingly, a gender agreement context is not required in order to observe gender effects, in that they are also observed with bare nouns. Overall, the findings support an integrative view of bilingual gender representation, with competitive and inhibitory processes at different levels of language processing underlying cross-language GC effects.

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“…We will discuss these in turn. However, as questions regarding the representation and processing of mass and count nouns are similar to those concerning grammatical gender (e.g., masculine, feminine; see Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999), we will refer to theories that discuss representation of grammatical gender where relevant.…”

Section: Characteristics Of Count Nouns and Mass Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For clarity from here on, we will use the more explicit terms: “fixed intrinsic lexical-syntactic properties” to refer to lexical-syntactic properties, “variable extrinsic lexical-syntactic features” to refer to lexical-syntactic features, we will use the term “lexical-syntactic attributes” to refer to both features and properties. All lemmas with a given lexical-syntactic attribute are connected to the same abstract node which marks this attribute (e.g., there is a single node for the grammatical gender [masculine]) (Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999). The lexical-syntactic nodes (e.g., [masculine],) are in turn connected to grammatically congruent lemma nodes, such as determiners and quantifiers (e.g., the German determiner “der masculine ”).…”

Section: Characteristics Of Count Nouns and Mass Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In all three accounts above, an activated and selected noun lemma would spread activation to its [mass]/[count] property. Like other fixed intrinsic lexical-syntactic properties in Levelt et al's (1999) theory, [mass]/[count] properties would only become selected if they are required for grammatical computation, for instance to select a countability congruent determiner/quantifier (e.g., “much” for mass nouns vs. “many” for count nouns, see Figure 9) but not for the production of bare nouns (see also Roelofs, 1992, 1993; Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999). However, Levelt et al do not specify the precise mechanism by which a lemma “knows” whether or not grammatical information should be selected dependent on the context.…”

Section: Characteristics Of Count Nouns and Mass Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Representation and processing of mass and count nouns: a review

2014

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Comprehension and/or production of noun phrases and sentences requires the selection of lexical-syntactic attributes of nouns. These lexical-syntactic attributes include grammatical gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), number (singular/plural) and countability (mass/count). While there has been considerable discussion regarding gender and number, relatively little attention has focused on countability. Therefore, this article reviews empirical evidence for lexical-syntactic specification of nouns for countability. This includes evidence from studies of language production and comprehension with normal speakers and case studies which assess impairments of mass/count nouns in people with acquired brain damage. Current theories of language processing are reviewed and found to be lacking specification regarding countability. Subsequently, the theoretical implications of the empirical studies are discussed in the context of frameworks derived from these accounts of language production (Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al., 1999) and comprehension (Taler and Jarema, 2006). The review concludes that there is empirical support for specification of nouns for countability at a lexical-syntactic level.

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Cited by 78 publications

References 58 publications

Semantically Transparent and Opaque Compounds in German Noun-Phrase Production: Evidence for Morphemes in Speaking

Semantically Transparent and Opaque Compounds in German Noun-Phrase Production: Evidence for Morphemes in Speaking

Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review

Representation and processing of mass and count nouns: a review

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