Multiple P3 evidence of a two-stage process in word gender decision

All French nouns must be assigned to one of two grammatical genders: masculine or feminine. Participants used either the superordinate labels masculin/féminin or the singular indefinite articles un/une to classify French target nouns. Reaction time to the labels masculin/féminin was about 200 ms longer than to the un/une labels. When the indefinite articles were used, a single P3 peak of the event-related potential was elicited. When superordinate labels were used, a double-peaked positivity was observed. The latency of the initial P3 in the masculin/féminin trials was not significantly different from that in the un/une trials. The second positive wave peaked approximately 300 ms following the first. An explanation consistent with these data is that subjects used a two-stage process to classify the nouns appearing with superordinate labels.