Taft M, Meunier F
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
J Psycholinguist Res. 1998 Jan;27(1):23-45. doi: 10.1023/a:1023270723066.
The relationship between gender and word ending in French is a quasiregular one (e.g., most words ending in -ette are feminine, but not all). As such, the gender of low-frequency irregular forms (e.g., squelette, which is masculine) should take longer to classify than low-frequency regular forms according to neural network models. A regularity effect was found in Experiment 1, but it did not interact with word frequency. It was further revealed that there was difficulty in making gender decisions (Experiment 2) and gender verification responses (Experiment 3) to words whose endings were highly informative of gender, but whose associated article was not. These words were place names beginning with a vowel, like Australie, which do not take an indefinite article and whose definite article is ambiguous (1'). How a neural network might handle these results is discussed, and an alternative account is considered whereby there are two potential sources of gender information, lexical and nonlexical, with the latter being used to confirm the former.
法语中性别与词尾之间的关系是一种准规则关系（例如，大多数以 -ette 结尾的词是阴性，但并非全部如此）。因此，根据神经网络模型，低频不规则形式（例如，squelette，它是阳性）的性别分类应该比低频规则形式花费更长时间。在实验1中发现了一种规则性效应，但它与词频没有相互作用。进一步发现，对于那些词尾对性别有高度提示性但相关冠词却没有的词，做出性别判断（实验2）和性别验证反应（实验3）存在困难。这些词是元音开头的地名，如Australie，它们不用不定冠词且其定冠词不明确（1'）。讨论了神经网络可能如何处理这些结果，并考虑了一种替代解释，即存在两个潜在的性别信息来源，词汇性的和非词汇性的，后者用于确认前者。
