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Phonological Regularities and Grammatical Gender Retrieval in Spoken Word Recognition and Word Production

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Abstract

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun’s phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun’s gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected. The noun stimuli could either belong to the gender class predicted by their ending (congruent) or they could belong to the gender class that was different from the predicted gender (incongruent). Gender decisions were made significantly faster for congruent nouns than for incongruent nouns, relative to a (lexical decision) baseline task. In Experiment 2, participants named pictures of the same materials as used in Experiment 1 with noun phrases consisting of a gender-marked determiner, a gender-marked adjective and a noun. In this Experiment, no effect of congruency, relative to a (bare noun naming) baseline task, was observed. Thus, the results show an effect of phonological information on the retrieval of gender-marked elements in spoken word recognition, but not in word production.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NICI, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Katharina Spalek & Herbert Schriefers

  2. Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt University Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Katharina Spalek

  3. Université de Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Julie Franck & Ulrich H. Frauenfelder

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  1. Katharina Spalek
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  2. Julie Franck
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  3. Herbert Schriefers
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  4. Ulrich H. Frauenfelder
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Correspondence to Katharina Spalek.

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Spalek, K., Franck, J., Schriefers, H. et al. Phonological Regularities and Grammatical Gender Retrieval in Spoken Word Recognition and Word Production. J Psycholinguist Res 37, 419–442 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-008-9074-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-008-9074-2

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