Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task

Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studied using the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participants are presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expected depending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors. However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character of an agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation of the direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolled variables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments with European Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentage of animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gender congruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Results support the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreement context, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis (Sá-Leite et al., 2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involved in the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to the detriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization.

The gender congruency effect in Catalan–Spanish bilinguals: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

The present study examines whether processing a word in one language is affected by the grammatical gender of its translation equivalent in another language. To this end, a group of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals performed a translation–recognition task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Participants were presented with Catalan and Spanish pairs of words and had to decide if they were translation equivalents. Correct translations included words that were gender congruent (estiuMAS/veranoMAS–summer) or gender incongruent (tardorFEM/otoñoMAS–autumn). The behavioral results showed that participants were faster and more accurate in the gender-congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. The ERP data showed a reduced N400 for the congruent condition. The facilitative effect of gender congruency observed in this study constitutes evidence of the obligatory access to grammatical gender information during bare noun processing and suggests that the bilinguals’ gender systems interact, even in highly proficient early bilinguals.

Gender congruency effects in Russian–Spanish and Italian–Spanish bilinguals: The role of language proximity and concreteness of words

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals perform a production task faster when the item is gender-congruent across their two languages than when it is not. The current study aimed to explore three factors that might modulate this effect: the similarity of the gender systems, the need to retrieve grammatical gender to perform the task, and the role of a semantic variable (concreteness) in the processing of gender information. In Experiment 1, Russian–Spanish bilinguals showed gender-congruency effects whether they translated concrete nouns in isolation or in noun-phrases. In contrast, the effect was restricted to noun phrases when they translated abstract words. In Experiment 2, Italian–Spanish bilinguals showed the gender-congruency effect regardless of the translation task. However, the effect was larger with concrete nouns in comparison with abstract nouns. These results are discussed in terms of the proximity of bilingual gender systems and the relationship between semantics and gender.

Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production

This study investigated the gender-congruency effect of animate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture–Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency revealed an inhibitory gender-congruency effect, as naming the pictures took longer in the presence of a gender-congruent distractor than with a distractor from a different gender category. The inhibitory effect was demonstrated for feminine (morphologically marked) nouns, across two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) (Experiments 1a and 1b), and masculine (morphologically unmarked) nouns (Experiment 2). The same pattern was observed when participants had to produce bare nouns (Experiment 1) or gender-marked noun phrases (Experiment 3). The inhibitory pattern of the effect resembles previous findings of bare nouns in a subset of Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish. These findings add to previous research which investigated the gender-congruency effect of inanimate nouns, where no effect of gender-congruent words was found. The results are discussed in relation to the null effect previously found for inanimate nouns. The comparison of the present and previous studies is motivated by a common linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in Hebrew, which ascribes grammatical gender specifications to derivational structures (for inanimate nouns) versus inflectional structures (for animate nouns). Given the difference in the notional meaning of gender specification for animate and inanimate nouns, the case of Hebrew exemplifies how language-specific characteristics, such as rich morphological structures, can be used by the linguistic system to express conceptual distinctions at the form-word level.

Morphological structure governs the process of accessing grammatical gender in the course of production

The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanimate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency and accuracy were measured. The gender congruency effect has been tested in various Indo-European languages, with mixed results. It seems to depend on both language-specific attributes and the syntactic context of the utterance. Speakers’ insensitivity to gender congruency was observed at 3 SOAs (Experiment 1a–1c). Neither the production of bare nouns (Experiments 1 & 3) nor gender-marked NPs (Experiment 2) elicited the effect. Nevertheless, the same procedure and targets revealed a semantic effect. The present findings in Hebrew deviate from previous results obtained with Indo-European languages. The results are discussed in connection with Hebrew’s nonconcatenative morphological features and the way linguistic characteristics govern the organizational principles of the mental lexicon and lexical access.

The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition

We investigate the ‘gender-congruency’ effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian–Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / ‘find the scarf’) and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects’ name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed.