Morphological Constraints on Lexical Access: Gender Priming in German

To investigate how morphological constraints affect lexical access, results of an experiment on grammatical gender priming in German are reported. In a " continuous picture-naming " (CPN) task, large and reliable differences in naming times were found between pictures preceded by gender-congruent contexts and pictures preceded by a zero-gender baseline, suggesting that grammatical gender can facilitate word access. In addition, we also found significant differences between zero-gender and gender-incongruent contexts, suggesting that grammatical gender can also have an inhibitory effect on word retrieval in real time. These facilitative and inhibitory effects were consistent across all three noun genders in German (i.e., masculine, feminine and neuter). Our findings for word production in German complement reports of gender priming in Italian, Spanish and French, showing strong morphological effects on lexical access. Implications for modular vs. interactive theories of lexical access are discussed. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of grammatical information on lexical access, with special reference to the facilitative and/or inhibitory effects of grammatical gender on word production in German. Earlier studies conducted in English revealed weak or nonexistent grammatical effects on lexical access (e. Significant gender-priming effects have also been reported for Italian in word repetition and gender classification tasks, using gender-marked adjectives as primes (in press), and for picture naming in Spanish, in sentence contexts that include gender-marked articles (Reyes, 1995). These results are compatible with a series of studies of word recognition in Serbo-Croatian assessing both gender and case priming, using visual lexical decision of nouns preceded by adjective primes general view that syntactic context does not influence lexical access (Tanenhaus & Lucas, 1987) may be compatible with results for English, but studies conducted in languages with a richly marked inflectional system reveal powerful morphological constraints on lexical access. Although gender marking appears to be an established phenomenon, the locus of these effects is still controversial. At first blush, these morphological priming results seem to indicate that lexical access can be "penetrated" by grammatical information that lies outside the lexicon itself, thus providing prima facie evidence against modular organization of lexical and grammatical processing. But is this the only explanation? Does morphological priming reflect a truly prelexical influence on word recognition? Could we explain the same phenomenon with intralexical connections that take place entirely within the lexicon? Or do these priming results reflect the application of postlexical strategies that only apply after the …