A psychological investigation of French speakers' skill with grammatical gender

Tucker, G. Richard; Lambert, Wallace E.; Rigault, André; Segalowitz, Norman

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(68)80007-6

Cited by 49 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…These results suggest that although phonological cues facilitate gender assignment, regular/ transparent gender nouns can be stored in the lexical memory. These results, however, contradict those of a seminal study for French carried out by Tucker et al (1968). French speakers were exposed to nonwords which had grammatical gender correlated endings.…”

Section: Literature Reviewcontrasting

confidence: 92%

“…This is very clear when we compare the reaction times of frequent transparent forms and frequent opaque forms. Participants were faster in gender agreement for frequent transparent forms compared to frequent opaque forms, infrequent transparent forms and infrequent opaque forms, replicating previous findings for other languages such as Italian (BATES et al, 1995), French (TAFT;MEUNIER, 1998;DESROCHERS et al, 1989;TUCKER et al, 1968), German (HOHFELD, 2006), Hebrew (GOLLAN; FROST, 2001) and Spanish (AFONSO et al, 2013). The faster reaction times to respond to frequent transparent forms than to respond to frequent opaque forms suggest that the phonological cues of the transparent forms yield a processing advantage as compared to a processing disadvantage for gender agreement with opaque forms, which, in turn, suggests that phonological cues facilitate gender processing.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

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A behavioral study to investigate the processing routes of grammatical gender in Brazilian Portuguese

Resende

Mota

2017

RELIN

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Este artigo apresenta um estudo comportamental que teve como objetivo investigar se substantivos inanimados do português do Brasil, transparentes quanto ao seu gênero gramatical (substantivos femininos terminados em -a e masculinos terminados em -o) e opacos (outras terminações) são ou não processados por mecanismos cognitivos distintos. Para tanto, uma tarefa de concordância de gênero foi executada por 19 sujeitos em duas condições: entre um artigo definido e um substantivo (condição 1) e entre um substantivo e um adjetivo (condição 2). Fatores como a frequência dos substantivos e adjetivos (alta vs. baixa) e forma fonológica (transparente vs. opaca) foram manipulados. Os resultados mostram que, em ambas as condições, a frequência é um forte preditor de respostas mais rápidas, sugerindo que tanto formas transparentes quanto formas opacas podem ser armazenadas na memória. Este padrão foi encontrado em ambas as condições. Estes resultados foram interpretados como evidência para a visão unitária de processamento da linguagem.

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Section: Literature Reviewcontrasting

confidence: 92%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

A behavioral study to investigate the processing routes of grammatical gender in Brazilian Portuguese

Resende

Mota

2017

RELIN

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“…Thus, semantic gender cues are accessed during explicit gender retrieval. Using a gender categorization task with invented words, Tucker, Lambert, Rigault, and Segalowitz (1968) found that the gender attributed to a pseudoword was correlated with the frequency with which its ending was actually associated with that gender in French. For example, a pseudoword with the typical feminine ending -ette (e.g., coumette*)1 was classiWed as feminine, a pseudoword with the typical masculine ending -on (e.g., tovon*) was classiWed as masculine, and a pseudoword with a neutral ending (e.g., tugique*) was inconsistently classiWed as masculine or feminine.…”

Section: Sensitivity To Phonological and Semantic Cues By French Adulmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: The acquisition of grammatical gender in French

Seigneuric

Zagar

Meunier

et al. 2007

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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“…Although not having conscious knowledge of these distributional facts, French-speaking children clearly use them when classifying unknown words into gender categories (Tucker, Lambert, Rigault, & Segalowitz, 1968). All of these correlations are probabilistic in nature, and, of course, they are not explicitly taught.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of word meanings

1990

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Four experiments were conducted to explore the correlation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of novel words. In the first experiment, adult English speakers invented nonsense words as names for random polygons differing in visual complexity. Visually simple polygons received names containing fewer syllables than visually complex polygons did. In addition, analyses of English word-object pairings indicated that a significant correlation between syllable number and visual complexity exists in the English lexicon. In Experiments 2 and 3, adult English speakers matched monosyllabic novel words more often than trisyllabic novel words with visually simple objects, whereas trisyllabic matches were more common for visually complex objects. Experiment 4 replicated these findings with children, indicating that the assumption of a correlation between word and visual complexity exists during the period of intense vocabulary growth. Although the actual correlation between syllable number and visual complexity is small, other posited constraints on word meaning are also limited in strength. However, an increasing number of small, language-specific word-meaning correlations are being uncovered. Given the documented ability of speakers to detect and use these subtle correlations, we argue that a more fruitful approach to word-meaning acquisition would forgo the search for a few broad, powerful word-meaning constraints, and we attempt to uncover individually weak, but perhaps jointly powerful word-meaning correspondences.Throughout the centuries, introspections on the acquisition of word meanings have identified ostensive definition as the prototypical naming game. An adult directs a child's attention toward a certain region of the visual scene while simultaneously muttering some word or phrase. The child then infers that this sound is the linguistic symbol for the relevant feature of the visual scene, and encodes the associated pair into memory. If the child can correctly perform this inference once during every 1 or 2 waking hours between the 1st and 5th years of age, a normal kindergartener' s vocabulary will be attained (Carey, 1982).This apparently simple and intuitively workable naming game has received extreme criticism over the last three decades. Quine (1960) in particular argued that pointing toward an object while speaking a word or phrase does not imply an obvious inference about the meaning of the utterance. For instance, consider a situation in which a

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A psychological investigation of French speakers' skill with grammatical gender

Cited by 49 publications

References 1 publication

A behavioral study to investigate the processing routes of grammatical gender in Brazilian Portuguese

A behavioral study to investigate the processing routes of grammatical gender in Brazilian Portuguese

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: The acquisition of grammatical gender in French

The relation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of word meanings

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