Assigning grammatical gender during word production

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine the processes by which grammatical gender is assigned during word production. French words varied in strength of sublexical cues, based on whether the word ending was typical for one gender rather than neutral about gender, and lexical cues, derived from the associated definite article being uninformative about gender for words beginning with a vowel, but informative for words beginning with a consonant. In Experiment 1. when native French speakers classified the gender of mentally evoked names of pictures, no effects of these cues were obtained. Experiment 2 used an improved methodology, with participants classifying the gender of words translated f..