Processing of Grammatical Gender in French: an Individual Differences Study

Abstract

Past studies of grammatical gender have shown that native speakers encounter processing difficulties when encountering a form that does not agree in gender with previous words. However, the specific behavioral and neural responses to these difficulties have not been replicated across studies of the same type. This is in part due to different experimental designs and statistical analyses, but a crucial factor may be the lack of control between nouns of masculine and feminine gender in stimuli creation. Masculine and feminine gender show distinct distributional asymmetries and collapsing them into one condition diminishes the explanatory power of any study examining grammatical gender. We used reading times in a self-paced reading experiment to examine whether masculine and feminine gender violations differentially affect processing speeds. Fifty French speakers read sentences that were well-formed or contained a mismatch in gender between determiner and noun, half of which were masculine and half feminine. Following Beatty-Martínez et al. (2021), we added individual difference measures to determine how participant-specific factors modulate processing. Participants also completed a category verbal fluency task and the AX-CPT, a measure of cognitive control. They found that ERP components were modulated by these components for Spanish speakers and the modulation differed between masculine noun and feminine noun violations. We hypothesized that reading times would be similarly affected in French, a closely related language with the same gender categories. However, no conditions or interactions reached statistical significance. It is unclear whether this is due to the experimental manipulation or lack of control for participants’ language background, as we had a high number of bilingual and multilingual participants. Regardless, elements of the procedure may provide insight on how to design future experiments that lay a groundwork in understanding the most basic elements of gender processing.