What a transparent Romance language with a Germanic gender-determiner mapping tells us about gender retrievalInsights from European Portuguese

  1. Ana Rita Sá-Leite 1
  2. Ângela Tomaz 2
  3. Juan Andrés Hernández- Cabrera 3
  4. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela 1
  5. Carlos Acuña Fariña 1
  6. Montserrat Comesaña 4
  1. 1 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
    info

    Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

    Santiago de Compostela, España

    ROR https://ror.org/030eybx10

  2. 2 Universidad de Lille
  3. 3 Universidad de La Laguna
    info

    Universidad de La Laguna

    San Cristobal de La Laguna, España

    ROR https://ror.org/01r9z8p25

  4. 4 Universidad Nebrija
    info

    Universidad Nebrija

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03tzyrt94

Journal:
Psicológica: Revista de metodología y psicología experimental

ISSN: 1576-8597

Year of publication: 2022

Volume: 43

Issue: 2

Type: Article

DOI: 10.20350/DIGITALCSIC/14777 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Psicológica: Revista de metodología y psicología experimental

Abstract

The study of the representation and processing of grammatical gender during language production has encountered mixed results regarding which conditions must be met to observe gender effects and whether these reflect the selection of gender values or competition between elements of agreement. The answer seems to depend on the number of determiners associated to each gender and on the language being explored. The present study aims to assess this issue through three picture-word interference tasks in European Portuguese. This is a transparent Romance language featuring a one-to-one gender-determiner mapping system similar to opaque Germanic languages. Conditions of gender in/congruency between targets and distractors were considered along with gender transparency and agreement. We observed a gender congruency effect restricted to noun phrases. Importantly, the effect was modulated by transparency, which seems relevant regardless of agreement. To explain the results, we adapted the Dual-Route Model of language comprehension to production.

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