Selection of freestanding and bound gender-marking morphemes in speech production: a review

Abstract

In the past years, numerous studies have investigated the production of gender-marking morphemes like determiners or adjectival inflections. In this article we review the evidence that has accumulated thus far, focussing on the question of whether freestanding and bound gender-marking morphemes are selected according to one processing mechanism or according to different processing mechanisms. We conclude that there is no need for postulating different selection mechanisms and that selection by competition seems to play a role in the processing of both freestanding and bound gender-marking morphemes.

Keywords:

• speech production
• lexical selection
• grammatical gender
• morphology

Notes

1. We use subscripts to indicate those elements which are marked for gender in the target language; common = common gender (in Dutch); masc = masculine; fem = feminine; neuter = neuter.

2. In fact, despite the somewhat weak empirical basis, it seems to be consensus among researchers in the field that the gender-congruency effect reflects interference in the gender-incongruent condition, with the only questions being of (1) whether this competition occurs at an abstract lexical (lemma) level or a wordform level and (2) whether it is confined to free morphemes or not.

3. According to a third view, neither open class items nor bound or freestanding closed-class items are selected by competition (Alario, Ayora, Costa, & Melinger, 2008).