Cognitive Processes & Behaviour Research Group, Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology & Methodology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Departamento de Psicología, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia.
Cognition. 2022 Jul;224:105060. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105060. Epub 2022 Feb 18.
Grammatical gender retrieval during language production has been largely addressed through the picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm, with the aim of capturing the so-called gender congruency effect (GCE). In the PWI paradigm, participants name target pictures while ignoring superimposed written distractor nouns. The GCE shows faster responses when target and distractor nouns share the same gender than when gender differs. Yet, the locus of this effect is not clear: it might be either due to the selection of a determiner or due to the selection of a gender node at the lemma level, which may be primed or delayed by competition. Importantly, many of those who argue that the GCE is not a genuine effect of gender conclude that gender is a feature that is retrieved automatically. Such a claim is controversial since the PWI paradigm has been seen as too complex and perhaps not sensitive enough to capture small effects. Besides, for Romance languages, mixed results draw a complex picture with effects occurring mainly in the opposite direction, i.e., a gender incongruency effect (GIE). In the present study, we conducted a meta-analysis of the 18 studies that have addressed this issue. The results confirm the existence of the GCE as a determiner effect in Germanic/Slavic languages, while little support is found for the GIE in Romance languages. Nevertheless, we argue that the absence of gender effects in Germanic and Slavic languages within the PWI paradigm cannot be taken as evidence of an absence of priming/competition during gender selection and thus as evidence of an automatic selection of gender. Parametric replication of previous studies, especially those featuring bound morphemes, together with the use of other measuring techniques such as event related potentials are suggested as a way forward.
在语言产生过程中，语法性别检索主要通过图片-单词干扰（PWI）范式来解决，目的是捕获所谓的性别一致性效应（GCE）。在 PWI 范式中，参与者在忽略叠加的书面干扰名词的情况下命名目标图片。当目标名词和干扰名词具有相同性别时，反应会更快，而当性别不同时则会变慢。然而，这种效应的发生位置尚不清楚：它可能是由于选择限定词，也可能是由于在词干水平选择性别节点，而性别节点可能会因竞争而被激活或延迟。重要的是，许多认为 GCE 不是真正的性别效应的人认为，性别是一种自动检索的特征。这种说法是有争议的，因为 PWI 范式被认为过于复杂，也许不够敏感，无法捕捉到较小的效应。此外，对于罗曼语系，混合结果则呈现出复杂的情况，效应主要出现在相反的方向，即性别不一致效应（GIE）。在本研究中，我们对 18 项研究进行了荟萃分析，这些研究都涉及到这个问题。结果证实了 GCE 作为日耳曼语/斯拉夫语的限定词效应的存在，而罗曼语系中则很少有支持 GIE 的证据。然而，我们认为，在 PWI 范式中，日耳曼语和斯拉夫语中没有性别效应，不能作为性别选择过程中不存在激活/竞争的证据，也不能作为性别自动选择的证据。建议对先前的研究进行参数复制，尤其是那些涉及有界语素的研究，并结合使用其他测量技术，如事件相关电位，作为前进的方向。
