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ERIC Number: EJ931857
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Nov
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: N/A
Determiner Selection in Romance Languages: Evidence from French
Foucart, Alice; Branigan, Holly P.; Bard, Ellen G.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v36 n6 p1414-1421 Nov 2010
Determiner selection requires the retrieval of the noun's syntactic features (e.g., gender) and sometimes of its phonological features. Miozzo and Caramazza (1999) argued that the selection of determiners in Germanic languages is more straightforward than in Romance languages because it is not dependent on the phonological properties of the following word. In the present study, we used the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the dependency of the determiner on the noun's features in French. In 3 experiments, we found a gender congruency effect at +200 stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), indicating that participants were slower to produce the name of a picture (determiner + noun) when the picture-word pair was incongruent in gender than when it was congruent. We failed to replicate this effect at 0 SOA, in line with previous studies (Alario & Caramazza, 2002). Our results suggest that the features involved in determiner selection are not language specific but rather are specific to the determiner system. (Contains 3 figures and 1 footnote.)
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org/publications
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A