Cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency effects: Evidence from meta-analyses

TL;DR

This paper uses meta-analyses to examine cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency effects during language production, confirming differences between Germanic/Slavic and Romance languages but not conclusively supporting the late selection hypothesis.

Contribution

It provides the first direct meta-analytical evidence of cross-linguistic gender congruency effects and tests the late selection hypothesis across languages.

Findings

Gender congruency effect present in German/Slavic languages.

No gender congruency effect observed in Romance languages with simultaneous presentation.

Insufficient evidence to confirm or reject the late selection hypothesis.

Abstract

It has been proposed that the order in which words are prepared for production depends on the speaker's language. When producing the translation equivalent of the small cat, speakers of German or Dutch select the gender-marked determiner at a relatively early stage of production. Speakers of French or Italian postpone the encoding of a determiner or adjective until the phonological form of the noun is available. Hence, even though the words are produced in the same order (e.g., die kleine Katze in German, le petit chat in French), they are not planned in the same order and might require different amounts of advanced planning prior to production onset. This distinction between early and late selection languages was proposed to account for the observation that speakers of Germanic and Slavic languages, but not of Romance languages, are slower to name pictures in the context of a distractor word of a different gender. Meta-analyses are conducted to provide the first direct test of this cross-linguistic difference and to test a prediction of the late selection hypothesis. They confirm the existence of the gender congruency effect in German/Slavic languages and its absence in Romance languages when target and distractor words are presented simultaneously. They do not allow confirming the hypothesis that in the latter languages, a similar effect emerges when the presentation of the distractor is delayed. Overall, these analyses confirm the cross-linguistic difference but show that the evidence available to date is not sufficient to confirm or reject the late selection hypothesis as an explanation of this difference. We highlight specific directions for future research.