The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: the case of bilinguals.

It has been known for some time that the recognition of a noun is affected by the gender marking, such as masculine or feminine, that is carried by a preceding word. In this study, we used auditory naming to examine how early and late English-French bilinguals react to gender marking when processing French. The early bilinguals showed clear facilitation and inhibition effects, but the late bilinguals were totally insensitive to gender marking, whether congruent or incongruent.

The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition.

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking--masculine or feminine--that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material.