Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Processing Grammatical Gender During Language Comprehension

  • Published:
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The paper reviews empirical evidence on the processing of grammatical gender during language comprehension, mainly focusing on gender priming. Evidence comes from behavioral experiments investigating gender priming and from behavioral as well as neurophysiological experiments evaluating the interaction of gender priming with semantic information. While the behavioral data do not provide a completely unambiguous picture, the neurophysiological data and the most reliable behavioral effects are more in line with a modular than with an interactive view of lexical access.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

REFERENCES

  • Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Pizzamiglio, L., D'Amico, S., & Hernandez, A. (1995). Gender and lexical access in Italian. Perception & Psychophysics, 57(6), 847-862.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Hernandez, A., & Pizzamiglio, L. (1996). Gender priming in Italian. Perception and Psychophysics, 58(7), 992-1004.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Carello, C., Lukatela, G., & Turvey, M. T. (1988). Rapid naming is affected by association but not by syntax. Memory and Cognition, 16(3), 187-195.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dell, G. S., & O'Seaghdha, P. G. (1992). Inhibition in interactive models of linguistic selection and sequencing. In D. Dagenbach & T. H. Carr (Eds.), Inhibitory processes in attention, memory and language (pp. 409-453). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deutsch, A., Bentin, S., & Katz, L. (this issue). Semantic influence on processing gender agreement: Evidence from Hebrew.

  • Friederici, A. D. (1995). The time course of syntactic activation during language processing: A model based on neuropsychological and neurophysiological data. Brain and Language, 50, 259-281.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Friederici, A. D., & Schriefers, H. (1994). The nature of semantic and morphosyntactic context effects on word recognition in young healthy and aphasic adults. Linguistische Berichte, Special Issue, 6, 9-32.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friederici, A. D., Frisch, S., & Steinhauer, K. (1998). Lexical integration: Sequential effects of syntactic and semantic information. Memory & Cognition, In press.

  • Friederici, A. D., Pfeifer, E., & Hahne, A. (1993). Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: Effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations. Cognitive Brain Research, 1, 183-192.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Grosjean, F., Dommergues, J., Cornu, E., Guillelmon, D., & Besson, M. (1994). The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition. Perception & Psychophysics, 56, 590-598.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gunter, T. C., Friederici, A. D., & Schriefers, H. (Submitted). Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction.

  • Gurjanov, M., Lukatela, G., Lukatela, K., Savic, M., & Turvey, M. T. (1985). Grammatical priming of inflected nouns by the gender of possessive adjectives. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 11(4), 692-701.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hagoort, P., Brown, C., & Groothusen, J. (1993). The syntactic positive shift as an ERP-measure of syntactic processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 439-483.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (Submitted). On the independence of early syntactic processes from semantic and attentional factors: Evidence from ERPs during auditory sentence comprehension.

  • Jescheniak, J., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech production: retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 824-843.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kluender, R., & Münte, T. F. (1998). ERPs to grammatical and ungrammatical subject/object asymmetries in German wh-questions. Paper presented at the 11th Annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  • Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A. (1984). Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association. Nature, 307, 161-163.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Levelt, W. J. M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A. S., Pechmann, T., & Havinga, J. (1991). The time course of lexical access in speech production: A study of picture naming. Psychological Review, 98(1), 122-142.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(1), 1-75.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Lorch, R. F., Balota, D. A., & Stamm, E. G. (1986). Locus of inhibition effects in the priming of lexical decisions: Pre-or postlexical access? Memory & Cognition, 14, 95-103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word recognition. Cognition, 25, 71-102.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Münte, T. F., Heinze, H. J., & Mangun, G. R. (1993). Dissociation of brain activity related to syntactic and semantic aspects of language. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5, 335-344.

    Google Scholar 

  • Neville, H. J., Nicol, J. Barss, A., Forster, K. & Garrett, M. (1991). Syntactically based sentence processing classes: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 155-170.

    Google Scholar 

  • O'Seaghdha, P. G. (1997). Conjoint and dissociable effects of syntactic and semantic context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 23(4), 807-828.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, P. J. (1992). Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 785-804.

    Google Scholar 

  • Radeau, M. & van Berkum, J. J. A. (1996). Gender decision. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11(6), 605-610.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roelofs, A. (1992). A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition, 42, 107-142.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Rösler, F., Friederici, A. D., Pütz, P., & Hahne, A. (1993). Event-related brain potentials while encountering semantic and syntactic constraint violations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5, 345-362.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schmidt, R. (1986). Was weiss der Artikel vom Hauptwort? Ein Beitrag zur Verarbeitung syntaktischer Beziehungen beim Lesen. Zeitschrift für experimentelle und angewandte Psychologie, 33, 150-163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schriefers, H., Friederici, A. D., & Rose (1998). Context effects in visual word recognition: Lexical relatedness and syntactic context. Memory & Cognition, 26, 1292-1303.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schriefers, H. & Jescheniak, J. D. (1999). The representation and processing of grammatical gender in language production. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, (in press).

  • Seidenberg, M. S., Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J. M., & Bienkowski, M. (1982). Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in context: Some limitations of knowledgebased processing. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 489-537.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seidenberg, M. S., Waters, G. S., Sanders, M., & Langer, P. (1984). Pre-and postlexical loci of contextual effects on word recognition. Memory & Cognition, 12, 315-328.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swinney, D. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 645-659.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tanenhaus, M. K., Dell, G. S., & Carlson, G. (1987). Context effects and lexical processing: A connectionist approach to modularity. In J. L. Garfield (Ed.), Modularity in knowledge representation and natural-language processing (pp. 83-108). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J., & Seidenberg, M. (1979). Evidence for multiple stages in the processing of ambiguous words in syntactic contexts. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 427-440.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tanenhaus, M. K., & Lucas, M. M. (1987). Context effects in lexical processing. Cognition, 25, 213-234.

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • van Berkum, J. J. A. (1996). The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender. Nijmegen: Nijmegen University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (1982). Source of inhibition in experiments on the effect of sentence context on word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 5, 385-399.

    Google Scholar 

  • West, R. F., & Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Robust effects of syntactic structure on visual word processing. Memory and Cognition, 14, 104-112.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wicha, N. Y., Hernandez, A., Reyes, I., de Barreto, L. G., & Bates, E. A. (1997). When zebras become painted donkeys: The interplay between gender and semantic priming in a Spanish sentence context. CRL.UCSD Technical Report 9701. University of California, San Diego.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wright, B., & Garrett, M. (1984). Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure. Memory and Cognition, 12, 25-64.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany

    Angela D. Friederici & Thomas Jacobsen

  2. Institut für Allgemeine Psychologie, Universität Leipzig, Germany

    Thomas Jacobsen

Authors
  1. Angela D. Friederici
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Thomas Jacobsen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Friederici, A.D., Jacobsen, T. Processing Grammatical Gender During Language Comprehension. J Psycholinguist Res 28, 467–484 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023264209610

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023264209610

Keywords

Search

Navigation