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Accessing grammatical gender in German: The impact of gender-marking regularities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2006

ANNETTE HOHLFELD
ANNETTE HOHLFELD
Affiliation:
Humboldt University, Berlin
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Abstract

The present study investigated whether German speakers compute grammatical gender on the basis of gender-marking regularities. To this purpose two experiments were run. In Experiment 1, participants had to assign the definite article to German nouns in an online task; in the second experiment, participants were confronted with German nouns as well as nonwords in an untimed gender assignment task. In the online experiment, which required the repetition of a visually presented noun with its corresponding definite article as fast as possible, reaction times show that the assignment of the definite determiner to a noun is not facilitated by gender-marking regularities. In an offline gender assignment task, however, participants profited from gender cues during gender assignment to nonwords.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 2006 , pp. 127 - 142
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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