Target items were embedded in fixed carrier phrases (e.g., “encuentra el/ la,” find the MASC/the FEM), and participants were instructed to find the named object. Using the looking-while-listening procedure, Lew-Williams and Fernald presented participants with two-picture visual scenes, in which objects either matched or differed in grammatical gender. For Spanish, the language under investigation in this review, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that Spanish-speaking children and adults exploit gender information on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. This is significant because it highlights the central role of articles in setting gender agreement features for the entire noun phrase ( Jakubowicz and Faussart, 1998). Results from Jakubowicz and Faussart (1998) have, in addition, shown that in a spoken lexical decision task, French adjectives phonetically marked for gender that intervened between an article and a noun (e.g., the adjective petit MASC /petite FEM, as in “le/*la petit chien,” the MASC/*the FEM little MASC dog MASC) do not increase the magnitude of the gender congruency effect relative to an invariant adjective without gender marking (e.g., the adjective pauvre MASC/FEM, as in “le/*la pauvre chien,” the MASC/*the FEM poor dog MASC). In addition, Cole and Segui (1994) reported that lexical decision is faster in French when primes are closed-class words (e.g., articles) relative to open-class words (e.g., adjectives), suggesting that the gender congruency effect changes as a function of word type. For instance, in Serbo-Croatian, lexical decision is faster for nouns preceded by adjective primes that match the nouns in gender than for those with mismatched preceding adjectives ( Gurjanov et al., 1985). This gender congruency effect has been reported in visual tasks (e.g., Jescheniak, 1999 Cubelli et al., 2005) and auditory tasks (e.g., Faussart et al., 1999 Dahan et al., 2000) and for languages with two genders (e.g., Barber and Carreiras, 2005) and more than two genders (e.g., van Berkum, 1996 Jacobsen, 1999). In (1b), the determiner “ el” and the adjective “ roj o” agree with “teleférico” (a masculine noun).Ī robust finding across languages with different gender systems (e.g., for Croatian, Costa et al., 2003 for French, Dahan et al., 2000 for German, Schmidt, 1986 for Italian, Bates et al., 1996 see Friederici and Jacobsen, 1999, for a review of early studies) is that when the gender of an article or adjective is congruent with that of the following noun, recognition of the noun is enhanced relative to a neutral baseline when it is incongruent, recognition is delayed. In other words, the determiner and the adjective agree in gender with the noun they accompany. In (1a), the form of the determiner is “ la” and of the adjective is “ roj a” because “televisión” is a feminine noun. Examples (1a) and (1b) from Spanish illustrate this: One such type of evidence is gender agreement ( Corbett, 1991). Linguists agree that a language is said to have a grammatical gender system if there is evidence for gender outside the nouns themselves. Simply put, it refers to “classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words” ( Hockett, 1958, p. 231 see also Comrie, 1999). Grammatical gender is a widespread feature in many of the world languages. Of relevance for the work presented here, studies examining grammatical gender provide evidence that information at one point in a sentence is used to anticipate other information downstream. Linguistic factors have long been known to modulate word identification. We discuss the implications of the findings for the design of future gender processing studies and, more broadly, for our understanding of the potential differences in the processing reflexes of grammatical gender classes within and across languages. Specifically, we examine distributional asymmetries between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, the resulting biases in gender assignment, and the consequences of these assignment strategies on gender expectancy and processing. The present work reviews linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic research on grammatical gender from different methodologies and across different profiles of Spanish speakers. Research on grammatical gender processing has generally assumed that grammatical gender can be treated as a uniform construct, resulting in a body of literature in which different gender classes are collapsed into single analysis. ![]() 2Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States.1Center for Language Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States.
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