Determiner selection in romance languages: evidence from French.

Determiner selection requires the retrieval of the noun's syntactic features (e.g., gender) and sometimes of its phonological features. Miozzo and Caramazza (1999) argued that the selection of determiners in Germanic languages is more straightforward than in Romance languages because it is not dependent on the phonological properties of the following word. In the present study, we used the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the dependency of the determiner on the noun's features in French. In 3 experiments, we found a gender congruency effect at +200 stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), indicating that participants were slower to produce the name of a picture (determiner + noun) when the picture-word pair was incongruent in gender than when it was congruent. We failed to replicate this effect at 0 SOA, in line with previous studies (Alario & Caramazza, 2002). Our results suggest that the features involved in determiner selection are not language specific but rather are specific to the determiner system.