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Determiner selection in romance languages: evidence from French.
Alice Foucart1, Holly P Branigan, Ellen G Bard
1Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7, George Square, Edinburgh, Scotland EH8 9JZ. alfoucart@googlemail.com
Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|September 1, 2010
Summary
Determiner selection in French depends on noun gender, not phonology. This finding suggests that features for determiner selection are universal to the determiner system, not language-specific.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistic Feature Processing
Background:
- Determiner selection involves accessing noun features, including gender and phonology.
- Previous research suggested Romance languages' determiner selection is complex due to phonological dependencies, unlike Germanic languages.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of noun features in determiner selection in French.
- To examine whether determiner selection is language-specific or dependent on universal linguistic features.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the picture-word interference paradigm.
- Conducted three experiments using French picture-noun stimuli.
- Measured reaction times at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), specifically 0 and +200 ms.
Main Results:
- A significant gender congruency effect was observed at +200 ms SOA.
- Participants exhibited slower responses when picture-noun gender was incongruent.
- No significant effect was found at 0 ms SOA, consistent with prior research.
Conclusions:
- Noun gender influences determiner selection in French, contrary to some previous hypotheses.
- The findings support the view that determiner selection relies on language-specific features within a universal determiner system.
- Linguistic feature retrieval for determiners may not be strictly language-dependent.
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