Linguistic gender and spoken-word recognition in French

Eye movements were monitored as French participants followed spoken instructions to use a computer mouse to click on one of four displayed pictures. Experiment 1 demonstrated that, in the absence of grammatical gender in the context preceding the referent name [e.g., cliquez sur les boutons (click on the((plural neut.)) buttons((masc.)))], participants fixated pictures with names sharing initial sounds with the target [e.g., bouteilles (bottles((fem.)))] more than on pictures with phonologically unrelated names, replicating "cohort" effects previously found with this paradigm. When a gender marked article immediately preceded the noun [e.g., cliquez sur le bouton (click on the((masc.)) button)], the early activation of the gender-inconsistent cohort was completely eliminated (Experiment 2). This demonstrates that the set of candidates initially considered for recognition of the noun is constrained by the gender-marked article. Two alternative accounts of these results, one based on grammatical level of processing and the other based on form-based statistics, are discussed. (C) 2000 Academic Press.