ABSTRACT
We investigated how listeners use gender-marked adjectives to adjust lexical predictions during sentence comprehension. Participants listened to sentence fragments in Spanish (e.g. “The witch flew to the village on her … ”) that created expectation for a specific noun (broomstickfem), and were completed by an adjective and a noun. The adjective either agreed (newfem), disagreed (newmasc), or was neutral (bigfem/masc) with respect to the expected noun’s gender. Using the visual-world paradigm, we monitored looks toward images of the expected noun versus an alternative of the opposite gender (helicoptermasc). While listening to the initial fragment, participants looked more towards the expected noun. Once the adjective was heard, looks shifted toward the noun that matched the adjective’s gender. Finally, upon hearing the noun, looks were affected by both previous context and adjective gender. We conclude that predictions are updated online based on gender cues, but sentence context still affects integration of the expected noun.
Acknowledgements
We thank Jordi Martorell and the Proactive group for helpful discussion throughout this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Arella E. Gussow http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6604-0481
Efthymia C. Kapnoula http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6640-1948
Nicola Molinaro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7549-6042
Notes
1. Although we refer to processing during target presentation as “integration”, it should be noted that we cannot draw a clear distinction between recognition and integration of the word, as these processes highly overlap (Molinaro, Conrad, Barber, & Carreiras, Citation2010).
2. Adjective duration did not differ between gender-marked and neutral items (M = 637 ± 87 and M = 653 ± 207 respectively; t(90.01) = −.59, p = .55).
3. Noun duration did not differ between expected and alternative items (M = 755 ± 202 and M = 778 ± 205 respectively; t(133.98) = −.65, p = .52).