RT Journal Article
T1 Of beavers and tables: the role of animacy in the processing of grammatical gender within a picture-word interference task
A1 Sá-Leite Dias, Ana Rita
A1 Haro Rodríguez, Juan
A1 Comesaña Vila, Montserrat
A1 Fraga Carou, Isabel
K1 Animacy
K1 Animate monitoring hypothesis
K1 Gender acquisition and processing hypothesis
K1 Gender congruency effect
K1 Grammatical gender
K1 Picture-word interference paradigm
K1 Semantic prioritization
AB Grammatical gender processing during language production has classically been studiedusing the so-called picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this procedure, participantsare presented with pictures they must name using target nouns while ignoringsuperimposed written distractor nouns. Variations in response times are expecteddepending on the congruency between the gender values of targets and distractors.However, there have been disparate results in terms of the mandatory character ofan agreement context to observe competitive gender effects and the interpretation ofthe direction of these effects in Romance languages, this probably due to uncontrolledvariables such as animacy. In the present study, we conducted two PWI experiments withEuropean Portuguese speakers who were asked to produce bare nouns. The percentageof animate targets within the list was manipulated: 0, 25, 50, and 100%. A gendercongruency effect was found restricted to the 0% list (all targets were inanimate). Resultssupport the selection of gender in transparent languages in the absence of an agreementcontext, as predicted by the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis(Sá-Leite et al., 2019), and are interpreted through the attentional mechanisms involvedin the PWI paradigm, in which the processing of animate targets would be favored to thedetriment of distractors due to biological relevance and semantic prioritization
PB Frontiers Media
SN 1664-1078
YR 2021
FD 2021
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/27367
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/27367
LA eng
NO Sá-Leite AR, Haro J, Comesaña M and Fraga I (2021) Of Beavers and Tables: The Role of Animacy in the Processing of Grammatical Gender Within a Picture-Word Interference Task. Front. Psychol. 12:661175
NO This work was supported by the Government of Spain, Ministry of Education and Vocational Training through the Training program for Academic Staff (FPU [BOE-B-2017-2646]), the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation with the research project PID2019-110583GB-I00, the Galician Government (grant for research groups ED431B 2019/2020), and by the FCT and FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653
DS Minerva
RD 27 abr 2026