The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanimate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency and accuracy were measured.
The gender congruency effect has been tested in various Indo-European languages, with mixed results. It seems to depend on both language-specific attributes and the syntactic context of the utterance.
Speakers’ insensitivity to gender congruency was observed at 3 SOAs (Experiment 1a–1c). Neither the production of bare nouns (Experiments 1 & 3) nor gender-marked NPs (Experiment 2) elicited the effect. Nevertheless, the same procedure and targets revealed a semantic effect.
The present findings in Hebrew deviate from previous results obtained with Indo-European languages. The results are discussed in connection with Hebrew’s nonconcatenative morphological features and the way linguistic characteristics govern the organizational principles of the mental lexicon and lexical access.
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Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Dank, Maya & Avital Deutsch
2023. Phonological instantiation of grammatical gender in the course of production is sensitive to words’ internal structure. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 76:8 ► pp. 1760 ff.
Sá-Leite, Ana Rita, Montserrat Comesaña, Carlos Acuña-Fariña & Isabel Fraga
2023. A cautionary note on the studies using the picture-word interference paradigm: the unwelcome consequences of the random use of “in/animates”. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Sá-Leite, Ana Rita, Karlos Luna, Ângela Tomaz, Isabel Fraga & Montserrat Comesaña
2022. The mechanisms underlying grammatical gender selection in language production: A meta-analysis of the gender congruency effect. Cognition 224 ► pp. 105060 ff.
2021. The dependence of root extraction in a non-concatenated morphology on the word-specific orthographic context. Journal of Memory and Language 116 ► pp. 104182 ff.
Sá-Leite, Ana Rita, Juan Haro, Montserrat Comesaña & Isabel Fraga
2021. Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Deutsch, Avital & Maya Dank
2019. Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 72:3 ► pp. 389 ff.
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