Syntactic processes in speech production: The retrieval of grammatical gender

Two picture-naming experiments tested the hypothesis that the speed with which native speakers of a gender-marking language retrieve the grammatical gender of a noun from their mental lexicon may depend on the recency of earlier access to that same noun's gender. Ss were 96 native speakers of Dutch. Recent gender access did not facilitate the production of gender-marked adjective noun phrases (Exp 1), nor that of gender-marked definite article noun phrases (Exp 2), even though naming times for the latter utterances were sensitive to the gender of a written distractor word superimposed on the picture to be named. This last result replicates and extends earlier gender-specific picture-word interference results found in H. Schriefers's 1993 study, showing that one can selectively tap into the production of grammatical gender agreement during speaking. The findings are relevant to theories of speech production and the representation of grammatical gender for that process.