Access to Phonological and Gender Information during Visual Word Recognition

Access to Phonological and Gender Information during Visual Word Recognition Florelle Chevaux (florelle.chevaux@etu.univ-lyon2.fr) Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69363 Lyon, France Julie Franck (Julie.Franck@pse.unige.ch) Laboratoire de psycholinguistique experimentale, Universite de Geneve 40 Boulevard du Pont d'Arve, 1205 Geneve, Suisse Fanny Meunier (fanny.meunier@univ-lyon2.fr) Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage 14 Avenue Berthelot, 69363 Lyon, France Ulrich Frauenfelder (Ulrich.Frauenfelder@pse.unige.ch) Laboratoire de psycholinguistique experimentale, Universite de Geneve 40 Boulevard du Pont d'Arve, 1205 Geneve, Suisse evidence for the time course of these events was provided in the field of word recognition. Although latest studies argued that both grammatical gender (see Friederici & Jacobsen, 1999 for a review) and phonological information (Coltheart & Rastle, 1994) become activated in the course of this process, there is, however, a debate whether the activated information is selected in any case or only if needed. The question addresses in the present study concerns the time course of the various processes involved in the treatment of gender, and more precisely, the aim was to determine whether the sequential timing of gender and wordform encoding found in production tasks was reversed in comprehension tasks. To investigate the time course of events involved in gender categorization we used a grammatical property of words stored in the mental lexicon which is their grammatical gender. French nouns are always marked for gender, either masculine or feminine (Corbett, 1991). Depending on the language, other word classes (i.e. closed-class), such as determiners, could also include gender marks. Selection of these items in the mental lexicon is based on variable information, i.e., according to noun’s properties they have to agree with. For instance, in French the forms of possessive articles vary according to grammatical gender of words, but also according to phonological features: nouns with consonant as initial letter are preceded by mon if they are masculine (e.g. mon fauteuil [my armchair]), and by ma (e.g. ma table [my table]) if they are feminine. In contrast, when the first phoneme is a vowel, regardless of the gender, determiners are associated with the form mon (e.g. mon etoile (fem) [my star]; mon arbre (masc) [my tree]). However, it is not a general and universal rule. If one considers indefinite articles, then the form used is based only on gender information: Masculine words are Abstract Alario and Caramazza (2002) have suggested that during noun production, gender and phonological information are both involved in determiner selection, although they act independently. They also suggested that this process occurs later in French than in other languages like German and Dutch. One possible reason is that in French, some determiner forms depend on the initial phoneme of the noun (e.g., the feminine possessive determiner), while others do not (e.g., the indefinite article). The aim of our study was to track the time course of these factors during word comprehension. A lexical decision task and three gender decision experiments (selection of the indefinite article, the possessive determiner or Masculine/Feminine categorization) were conducted. We observed that all gender decision tasks were sensitive to the initial phoneme, whereas a gender effect was only found for categorization possessive articles. The results support the hypothesis that determiners are selected late in comprehension, as in production. Keywords: Visual Word recognition, phonological access, gender access, Introduction Word production and recognition are higly complex tasks, involving the rapid coordination of visual, phonological, semantic and syntactic processes. Many studies were interested, in the last decades, to the temporal integration to phonological and gender cues during language production. They suggested that access to syntactic gender information was likely to be quicker than access to information concerning the phonological and orthographical form of the word (Caramazza & Miozzo, 1997; Levelt & al, 1991, 1999; Schmitt, Rodriguez- Fornells, Kutas & Munte, 2001; Van Turennout, Hagoort & Brown, 1997, 1998). By contrast, very little empirical