TY - JOUR
T1 - Neuter is not Common in Dutch
T2 - Eye Movements Reveal Asymmetrical Gender Processing
AU - Loerts, Hanneke
AU - Wieling, Martijn
AU - Schmid, Monika S.
PY - 2013/12
Y1 - 2013/12
N2 - Native speakers of languages with transparent gender systems can use gender cues to anticipate upcoming words. To examine whether this also holds true for a non-transparent two-way gender system, i.e. Dutch, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to click on one of four displayed items on a screen (e.g., Klik op deCOM rode appelCOM, 'Click on the COM red appleCOM'). The items contained the target, a colour- and/or gender-matching competitor, and two unrelated distractors. A mixed-effects regression analysis revealed that the presence of a colour-matching and/or gender-matching competitor significantly slowed the process of finding the target. The gender effect, however, was only observed for common nouns, reflecting the fact that neuter gender-marking cannot disambiguate as all Dutch nouns become neuter when used as diminutives. The gender effect for common nouns occurred before noun onset, suggesting that gender information is, at least partially, activated automatically before encountering the noun.
AB - Native speakers of languages with transparent gender systems can use gender cues to anticipate upcoming words. To examine whether this also holds true for a non-transparent two-way gender system, i.e. Dutch, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to click on one of four displayed items on a screen (e.g., Klik op deCOM rode appelCOM, 'Click on the COM red appleCOM'). The items contained the target, a colour- and/or gender-matching competitor, and two unrelated distractors. A mixed-effects regression analysis revealed that the presence of a colour-matching and/or gender-matching competitor significantly slowed the process of finding the target. The gender effect, however, was only observed for common nouns, reflecting the fact that neuter gender-marking cannot disambiguate as all Dutch nouns become neuter when used as diminutives. The gender effect for common nouns occurred before noun onset, suggesting that gender information is, at least partially, activated automatically before encountering the noun.
KW - Grammatical gender
KW - Lexical anticipation
KW - Mixed-effects modelling
KW - Spoken language comprehension
KW - Visual world paradigm
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84886089564&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10936-012-9234-2
DO - 10.1007/s10936-012-9234-2
M3 - Article
C2 - 23229089
AN - SCOPUS:84886089564
SN - 0090-6905
VL - 42
SP - 551
EP - 570
JO - Journal of psycholinguistic research
JF - Journal of psycholinguistic research
IS - 6
ER -