0000000000667378
AUTHOR
Elsa Spinelli
The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.
International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…
Spoken word recognition with gender-marked context.
In a cross-modal (auditory-visual) fragment priming study in French, we tested the hypothesis that gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine or unefeminine) is used early in the recognition of the following word to discard gender-incongruent competitors. In four experiments, we compared lexical decision performances on targets primed by phonological information only (e.g. /kRa/-CRAPAUD /kRapo/; /to/-TOAD) or by phonological plus gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine /kra/-CRAPAUD; a /to/-TOAD). In all experiments, we found a phonological priming effect that was not modulated by the presence of gender context, whether gender-marked …
The morpheme gender effect.
In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with an opposite gender compared to words for which the gender of the base matches that of the derived noun. Similar results were obtained for words that are pseudo-morphologically complex while no effect was observed for non-morphological embedded words. Our results suggest that during gender identification of derived and pseudo-derived words, morphem…
MEGALEX- A new mega-study of visual word recognition: Some preliminary data
International audience
MEGALEX: A new mega-study of visual and auditory word recognition in French
International audience; We present a new mega-study (called MEGALEX) involving the collection of visual and auditory lexical decision data for 28,000 French words and the same number of pseudowords. This new mega-study applied the repeated measures design developed by Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, and Brysbaert (2012). For each modality tested (visual vs. auditory), two groups of 40 participants each responded to 14,000 words and the same number of pseudowords for a total duration of 20h (divided over multiple sessions). Collected reaction times were submitted to multiple regression analyses in order to study the influence of continuous lexical variables such as word frequency, word length (in l…