Processing of grammatical gender in a three-gender system: experimental evidence from Russian

Abstract

Four experiments investigated the effect of grammatical gender on lexical access in Russian. Adjective-noun pairs were presented auditorily, using a cued-shadowing technique in which subjects must repeat the second word (the target noun), following adjectives that are either concordant or discordant with the noun's gender. Experiment 1 demonstrates gender priming with unambiguous adjectives and phonologically transparent masculine or feminine nouns. Experiment 2 examines priming for transparent nouns against a neutral baseline (possible only for feminines and neuters), revealing that priming is due primarily to inhibition from discordant gender. Experiment 3 demonstrates gender priming with phonologically opaque masculine and feminine nouns. Experiment 4 returns to transparent masculine and feminine nouns with a different kind of baseline, using three versions of a single word root (prost--simple, in the feminine adjectival form prostaja, masculine adjectival form prostoj, and the adverbial form prosto), and shows that gender can also facilitate lexical access, at least for feminine nouns. We conclude that Russian listeners can exploit gender agreement cues "on-line," helping them to predict the identity of an upcoming word.