The article’s noun and the noun’s article: explorations into the representation and access of linguistic gender in Dutch

This study deals with the processes that operate in the verification and access of linguistic gender in Dutch nouns. We employed two tasks, article assignment and article verification, to compare the time courses of these processes. Article verification involves deciding whether auditorily presented combinations of articles and nouns agree in linguistic gender. Assignment involves deciding which article goes with an auditorily presented noun. The reaction time results indicate a category priming effect, i.e. the priming of the syntactically appropriate word class (noun) by the presentation of an article. In addition, we found a gender effect. Verification and assignment involving nouns of the de class produced shorter reaction times than the same task involving nouns of the het class. This finding agrees with our suggestion that Dutch linguistic gender is mentally represented as an abstract binary feature ( ±DE), rather than as a 'link' between morphemes belonging to the same gender class. We discuss the relevance of linguistic gender in a cross-linguistic approach to the study of language processing.