When Sex and Syntax Go Hand in Hand: Gender Agreement in Language Production

Vigliocco, Gabriella; Franck, Julie

doi:10.1006/jmla.1998.2624

Cited by 139 publications

(202 citation statements)

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“…However, for Romance speakers, the production of masculine pronouns seems to be more easily disrupted by the presence of another noun bearing feminine gender since the congruency effect is greater for masculine than for feminine pronouns, F(1,41) = 9.38, p < .01. This accords with some results in the literature showing masculine to be the default gender and feminine to be the marked gender (Antón-Méndez, Nicol & Garrett, 2002;Harris, 1991), although the effect has not been found consistently (Vigliocco & Franck, 1999).…”

supporting

confidence: 91%

Whose? L2-English speakers' possessive pronoun gender errors

Antón-Méndez

2010

Bilingualism

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supporting

confidence: 91%

Whose? L2-English speakers' possessive pronoun gender errors

Antón-Méndez

2010

Bilingualism

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“…Indeed, in Experiment 1b grammatical-gender values (masculine/feminine) were not equally distributed within the two AoA conditions (see the Supplemental Materials). In addition, since some studies have reported an interaction between natural gender and grammatical gender (e.g., Vigliocco & Franck, 1999), pictures depicting animals needed to be excluded from the gender decision task. We addressed these issues in Experiment 2.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-of-acquisition effects in delayed picture-naming tasks

et al. 2012

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We report two experiments that explored the linguistic locus of age-of-acquisition effects in picture naming by using a delayed naming task that involved only a low proportion of trials (25 %) while, for the large majority of the trials (75 %), participants performed another task-that is, the prevalent task. The prevalent tasks were semantic categorization in Experiment 1a and grammatical-gender decision in Experiments 1b and 2. In Experiment 1a, in which participants were biased to retrieve semantic information in order to perform the semantic categorization task, delayed naming times were affected by age of acquisition, reflecting a postsemantic locus of the effect. In Experiments 1b and 2, in which participants were biased to retrieve lexical information in order to perform the grammatical gender decision task, there was also an age-of-acquisition effect. These results suggest that part of the age-of-acquisition effect in picture naming occurs at the level at which the phonological properties of words are retrieved.Keywords Speech production . Psycholinguistics . Age-ofacquisition . Picture naming It has been demonstrated that pictures whose names were acquired early in life are named faster and more accurately than pictures whose names were acquired later (e.g., Brysbaert & Ghyselinck, 2006). The issue of age-of-acquisition (hereafter, AoA) effects in speech production has a rich tradition of empirical research. Picture naming entails several cognitive stages of processing, such as perceptual processing, semantic access, lexical selection, and phonological encoding. Empirical research into AoA effects at the first two stages of processing has already been provided. The fact that AoA interacts with the visual degradation of the stimulus, but not with name frequency, suggests that part of the phenomenon arises at the perceptual level (Catling, Dent, & Williamson, 2008). Evidence for a semantic locus of the phenomenon has come, for instance, from semantic categorization tasks, in which participants were required to classify pictures on the basis of semantic information. The results showed faster reaction times (RTs) for early-acquired than for late-acquired items (e.g., Johnston & Barry, 2005). Beyond these prelexical sources of the phenomenon, in the present research we focused on AoA effects ascribed at linguistic stages-that is, lexical selection and phonological encoding.In order to search for a lexical source of the AoA phenomenon, Belke, Brysbaert, Meyer, and Ghyselinck (2005) exploited the semantic cyclic cost in picture naming, which refers to the observation that naming latencies are slower when pictures are presented in blocks containing other semantic-coordinate pictures than when they are presented in blocks containing non-semantic-coordinate pictures. Under the assumption that the semantic cyclic cost reflects lexical selection difficulties, if part of the AoA phenomenon has a lexical localization, an interaction should occur between the cyclic cost and AoA. This prediction was confirmed, ...

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“…Researchers have used the gender of nouns to investigate word retrieval and word production (e.g., Akhutina, Kurgansky, Polinsky, & Bates, 1999;Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996;Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, Damico, & Hernandez, 1995;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, & Bates, 1999;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, Wicha, & Bates, 2003;Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, & Guillelmon, 1994;Jacobsen, 1999;van Berkum, 1997;Vigliocco & Franck, 1999;Vigliocco, Lauer, Damian, & Levelt, 2002;Vigliocco, Vinson, Indefrey, Levelt, & Hellwig, 2004;Vigliocco & Zilli, 1999), cohort activation in word recognition (e.g., Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2000), processing differences between pictures and words (e.g., Bowers, Vigliocco, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Vinson, 1999), the relative timing of syntactic and phonological processes during lexical access (e.g., Schmitt, Rodriguez-Fornells, Kutas, & Munte, 2001a;Schmitt, Schiltz, Zaake, Kutas, & Munte, 2001b;van Turennout, Hagoort, & Brown, 1998) and the interplay between discourse, semantic, and syntactic level processes (e.g., Brown, van Berkum, & Hagoort, 2000;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;Deutsch, Bentin, & Katz, 1999;Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000;Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997;Hagoort, 2003;van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort, 1999;Wicha, 2002;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2000). Recent studies have also provided electrophysiological evidence for the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement during sentence comprehension (e.g., Brown et al, 2000;Demestre, Meltzer, Garcia-Albea, & Vigil, 1999;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

Wicha

Orozco-Figueroa

Reyes

et al. 2005

Language and Cognitive Processes

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This study investigates the contribution of grammatical gender to integrating depicted nouns into sentences during on-line comprehension, and whether semantic congruity and gender agreement interact using two tasks: naming and semantic judgement of pictures. Native Spanish speakers comprehended spoken Spanish sentences with an embedded line drawing, which replaced a noun that either made sense or not with the preceding sentence context and either matched or mismatched the gender of the preceding article. In Experiment 1a (picture naming) slower naming times were found for gender mismatching pictures than matches, as well as for semantically incongruous pictures than congruous ones. In addition, the effects of gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted; specifically, pictures that were both semantically incongruous and gender mismatching were named slowest, but not as slow as if adding independent delays from both violations. Compared with a neutral baseline, with pictures embedded in simple command sentences like "Now please say ____", both facilitative and inhibitory effects were observed. Experiment 1b replicated these results with low-cloze gender-neutral sentences, more similar in structure and processing demands to the experimental sentences. In Experiment 2, participants judged a picture's semantic fit within a sentence by button-press; gender agreement and semantic congruity again interacted, with gender agreement having an effect on congruous but not incongruous pictures. Two distinct effects of gender are hypothesised: a "global" predictive effect (observed with and without overt noun production), and a "local" inhibitory effect (observed only with production of gender-discordant nouns).

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When Sex and Syntax Go Hand in Hand: Gender Agreement in Language Production

Cited by 139 publications

References 29 publications

Whose? L2-English speakers' possessive pronoun gender errors

Whose? L2-English speakers' possessive pronoun gender errors

Age-of-acquisition effects in delayed picture-naming tasks

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

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