Does Gender Information Influence Early Phases of Spoken Word Recognition

Does Gender Information Influence Early Phases of Spoken Word Recognition? Elsa Spinelli (elsa.spinelli@upmf-grenoble.fr) Universite Pierre Mendes France Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition BP 48, 38040 Grenoble Cedex 9 FRANCE Fanny Meunier (fanny.meunier@ish-lyon.cnrs.fr) Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage Institut des Sciences de l’Homme 14 avenue Berthelot, 69 363 Lyon Cedex 07 FRANCE Alix Seigneuric (alix.seigneuric@u-bourgogne.fr) Universite de Bourgogne, UFR Sciences Humaines 2 bd Gabriel, 21000 Dijon FRANCE Abstract In a cross modal fragment priming study, we tested the hypothesis that gender information is used early to discard gender-incongruent competitors during word comprehension. In three experiments, we compared the lexical decision performances on targets primed by phonological information only (e.g. /kra/-CRAPAUD) or by phonological plus gender information (e.g. un masc /kra/-CRAPAUD). In all experiments, we found a phonological priming effect that was not modulated by the presence of gender information, whether gender was congruent with the target (Exp1 and Exp2) or incongruent with the target (Exp3). Moreover, phonological facilitation was not modulated by the presence of gender information, whether gender allowed exclusion of less frequent competitors (Exp1) or more frequent ones (Exp2). We concluded that gender information extracted from a gender-marked determiner is not used early in the process of spoken word recognition. Keywords : context effect, word recognition, gender Introduction In French, each noun is either feminine or masculine. Determiners obey a gender agreement rule so the gender of a noun following a masculine indefinite article (e.g.”un”/E) /) is masculine, and a noun following a feminine indefinite article (e.g. “une”/yn/) is feminine. Since articles always precede nouns in French, the presence of such specific markers in spoken utterances could aid listeners by providing specific cues for decoding what they hear. Number of studies have indeed shown effects of gender on word recognition. Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillelmon, and Besson (1994) compared lexical decision times to nouns preceded by an auditorily non gender-marked adjective or preceded by a gender-marked determiner plus the same adjective (e.g., “jolie table” vs. “une fem jolie table”). Faster responses were found for the gender marked context condition. Recently, Bolte & Connine (in press) showed faster lexical decision times to targets preceded by valid gender-marked article (either feminine, masculine or neutral in German) compared to targets preceded by a noise masked article. Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez and Pizzamiglio (1996) also showed robust gender priming. Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus and Magnuson (2000) assessed the impact of gender on lexical access in a study where French participants were instructed auditorily to mouse-click on pictures of objects displayed on a computer screen while their eye movements were monitored. When participants heard instruction sentences that did not include gender information – e.g., “cliquez sur les. (boutons)”, “click on the. ”, where “the” is plural but not gender-marked – the probability of fixation was higher for pictures with names that shared initial phonemes with the target (“cohort” effect), compared to pictures that had unrelated names. When a gender-marked article preceded the target noun – e.g., “cliquez sur le bouton”, “click on the button”, where “the” is marked for masculine gender – the members of the phonological cohort that were not of the marked gender received no more fixations than the unrelated competitors. Spinelli and Alario (2002) examined whether gender information could constrain the activation of fully ambiguous words: homophones with two different genders (e.g., /sEl/ meaning salt masculine or saddle feminine ). In a cross-modal semantic priming study, they found that when homophones were presented in isolation, facilitation was found for targets related to both the masculine (e.g., “poivre”, pepper) and the feminine (e.g., “cheval”, horse) meanings of the homophones. However, when homophones were presented with a gender- marked definite article (e.g., /lasEl/, the saddle), facilitation was found only for targets related to the meaning matching the gender information given by the article (e.g., “cheval”).