Abstract
The role of grammatical gender for auditory word recognition in German was investigated in three experiments and two sets of corpus analyses. In the corpus analyses, gender information reduced the lexical search space as well as the amount of input needed to uniquely identify a word. To test whether this holds for on-line processing, two auditory lexical decision experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) were conducted using valid, invalid, or noise-masked articles as primes. Clear gender-priming effects were obtained in both experiments. Experiment 2 used phoneme monitoring with words and with pseudowords deviating from base words in one or more phonological features. Contrary to the lexical decision latencies, phoneme-monitoring latencies showed no influence of gender but did show similarity mismatch effects. We argue that gender information is not utilized early during word recognition. Rather, the presence of a valid article increases the initial familiarity of a word, facilitating subsequent responses.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balota, D. A., &Chumbley, J. I. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,10, 340–357.
Balota, D. A., &Chumbley, J. I. (1990). Where are the effects of frequency in visual word recognition tasks? Right where we said they were! Comment on Monsell, Doyle, and Haggard (1989).Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,119, 231–237.
Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Hernandez, A., &Pizzamiglio, L. (1996). Gender priming in Italian.Perception & Psychophysics,58, 992–1004.
Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Pizzamiglio, L., D’Amico, S., &Hernandez, A. (1995). Gender and lexical access in Italian.Perception & Psychophysics,57, 847–862.
Bates, E., &MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.),The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3–73). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baumann, H., Nagengast, J., & Wittenburg, P. (1992).A new experimental set-up, a tool for experimenting in the 90s. Paper presented at the International Congress of Social Science Information Technology, Amsterdam.
Bentrovato, S., Devescovi, A., D’Amico, S., &Bates, E. (1999). Effect of grammatical gender and semantic context on lexical access in Italian.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,28, 677–693.
Berkum, J. J. A. van, Brown, C. M., &Hagoort, P. (1999). When does gender constrain parsing? Evidence from ERPs.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,28, 555–571.
Bölte, J. (2001). Graded lexical activation by pseudowords in crossmodal semantic priming: Spreading of activation, backward priming, or repair? In J. D. Moore & K. Stenning (Eds.),Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 86–91). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bölte, J., &Coenen, E. (2002). Is phonological information mapped onto semantic information in a one-to-one manner?Brain & Language,81, 384–397.
Bölte, J., &Uhe, M. (2004). When is all understood and done? The psychological reality of the recognition point.Brain & Language,88, 133–147.
Brants, T. (1996).TnT—Statistical part-of-speech tagging (Tech. Rep.). Saarbrücken, Germany: University of the Saarland, Computational Linguistics.
Carello, C., Lukatela, G., &Turvey, M. T. (1988). Rapid naming is affected by association but not by syntax.Memory & Cognition,16, 187–195.
Carter, D. M. (1987). An information-theoretic analysis of phonetic dictionary access.Computer Speech & Language,2, 1–11.
CELEX (1995). [German database, Release D25.] Nijmegen: Centre for Lexical Information.
Colé, P., Pynte, J., &Andriamamonjy, P. (2003). Effect of grammatical gender on visual word recognition: Evidence from lexical decision and eye movement experiments.Perception & Psychophysics,65, 407–419.
Colé, P., &Segui, J. (1994). Grammatical incongruency and vocabulary types.Memory & Cognition,22, 387–394.
Connine, C. M. (1987). Constraints on interactive processes in auditory word recognition: The role of sentence context.Journal of Memory & Language,26, 527–538.
Connine, C. M., Ferreira, F., Jones, C., Clifton, C., Jr., &Frazier, L. (1984). Verb frame preferences: Descriptive norms.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,13, 307–319.
Connine, C. M., &Titone, D. (1996). Phoneme monitoring.Language & Cognitive Processes,11, 635–645.
Connine, C. M., Titone, D., Deelman, T., &Blasko, D. (1997). Similarity mapping in spoken word recognition.Journal of Memory & Language,37, 463–480.
Dahan, D., Swingley, D., Tanenhaus, M. K., &Magnuson, J. S. (2000). Linguistic gender and spoken-word recognition in French.Journal of Memory & Language,42, 465–480.
Deelman, T., &Connine, C. M. (2001). Missing information in spoken word recognition: Non-released stop consonants.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,27, 656–663.
Donders, F. C. (1969). Over de snelheid van psychische processen [On the speed of mental processes],Acta Psychologica,30, 412–431.
Frauenfelder, U. H., &Segui, J. (1989). Phoneme monitoring and lexical processing: Evidence for associative context effects.Memory & Cognition,17, 134–140.
Friederici, A. D., &Jacobsen, T. (1999). Processing grammatical gender during language comprehension.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,28, 467–484.
Friston, K. J., Price, C. J., Fletcher, P., Moore, C., Frackowiak, R. S. J., &Dolan, R. J. (1996). The trouble with cognitive subtraction.NeuroImage,4, 97–104.
Gaskell, G. M., &Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1997). Integrating form and meaning: A distributed model of speech perception.Language & Cognitive Processes,12, 613–656.
Gaskell, G. M., &Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2002). Representation and competition in the perception of spoken words.Cognitive Psychology,45, 220–266.
Grosjean, F., Dommergues, J.-Y., Cornu, E., Guillelmon, D., &Besson, C. (1994). The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition.Perception & Psychophysics,56, 590–598.
Gurjanov, M., Lukatela, G., Moskovljevic, J., Savic, M., &Turvey, M. T. (1985). Grammatical priming of inflected nouns by inflected adjectives.Cognition,19, 55–71.
Jacobsen, T. (1999). Effects of grammatical gender on picture and word naming: Evidence from German.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,28, 499–514.
Kinoshita, S. (2002, November).Estimating the baseline in semantic priming effect. Paper presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Kansas City, MO.
Kloecke, W. U. S. (1982).Phonologie und Morphologie [Phonology and morphology]. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer.
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., &Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production.Behavioral & Brain Sciences,22, 1–75.
Luce, R. D. (1986).Response times: Their role in inferring elementary mental organization. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word-recognition.Cognition,25, 71–102.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1993). Issues of process and representation in lexical access. In G. T. M. Altmann & R. Shillcock (Eds.),Cognitive models of speech processing: The Second Sperlonga Meeting (pp. 187–210). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
McClelland, J. L., &Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception.Cognitive Psychology,18, 1–86.
Mitchell, D. C., Cuetos, R., Corley, M. M. B., &Brysbaert, M. (1995). Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (non-lexical) statistical records.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,24, 469–488.
Neely, J. H. (1991). Semantic priming effects in visual word recognition: A selective review of current findings and theories. In D. Besner & G.W. Humphreys (Eds.),Basic processes in reading: Visual word recognition (pp. 264–336). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Norris, D. (1994). Shortlist: A connectionist model of continuous speech recognition.Cognition,52, 189–234.
Norris, D., McQueen, J., &Cutler, A. (2000). Merging information in speech recognition: Feedback is never necessary.Behavioral & Brain Sciences,23, 299–370.
Patterson, D., &Connine, C. M. (2001). A corpus analysis of variant frequency in American English flap production.Phonetica,58, 254–275.
Patterson, D., LoCasto, P. C., &Connine, C. M. (2003). Corpora analyses of frequency of schwa deletion in conversational American English.Phonetica,60, 45–69.
Ramers, K. H., &Vater, H. (1992).Einführung in die Phonologie [Introduction to phonology]. Hürth-Efferen, Germany: Gabel Verlag.
Ratcliff, R. (1993). Methods for dealing with reaction time outliers.Psychological Bulletin,114, 510–532.
Schiller, N., &Caramazza, A. (2003). Grammatical feature selection in noun phrase production: Evidence from German and Dutch.Journal of Memory & Language,48, 169–194.
Schmidt, R. (1986). Was weiß der Artikel vom Hauptwort? Ein Beitrag zur Verarbeitung syntaktischer Beziehungen beim Lesen [What does the article know about the noun? A contribution about the processing of syntactic relations during reading].Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie,33, 150–163.
Schriefers, H., &Jescheniak, J. (1999). Representation and processing of grammatical gender in language production: A review.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research,28, 575–600.
Schriefers, H., Meyer, A., &Levelt, W. J. M. (1990). Exploring the time-course of lexical access in language production: Picture-word interferences studies.Journal of Memory & Language,29, 86–102.
Tanenhaus, M. K., &Lucas, M. M. (1987). Context effects in lexical processing.Cognition,25, 213–234.
Zwitserlood, P. (1989). The locus of the effects of sentential-semantic context in spoken-word processing.Cognition,32, 25–64.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The phoneme-monitoring experiment was conducted in Münster while C.M.C. was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, and was supported by NIH Grant R01 DC02134.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bölte, J., Connine, C.M. Grammatical gender in spoken word recognition in German. Perception & Psychophysics 66, 1018–1032 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194992
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194992