Sublexical and Lexical Influences on Gender Assignment in French

Abstract

Two experiments showed that French native speakers rely on sublexical and lexical cues to allocate gender during word recognition. Sublexical cues were based on whether the word ending was typical for a particular gender rather than neutral with regard to gender. Lexical cues were based on whether the associated definite article was informative (for words beginning with a consonant) or uninformative (for words beginning with a vowel). Classification of single nouns and verification of grammatical combinations of indefinite article and noun led to longer times when both sublexical and lexical cues were uninformative compared with when one or both cues were informative. Verification of ungrammatical combinations of indefinite article and noun yielded separate effects of both cues, though only when monitoring for both semantic and syntactic unacceptability in meaningful phrases did people attend to both cues independently. It was argued that people became more cautious in their gender assignments as task requirements became “deeper”. If strategic changes as a function of task demands are incorporated, the results are compatible with connectionist models proposing that gender decisions are computed from strength of past associations of the word and gender-specifying elements.