Phonological instantiation of grammatical gender in the course of production is sensitive to words' internal structure.

Research on the gender-congruency effect in speech production across languages suggests that access to grammatical gender during production is modulated by language-specific properties. The present study extends this line of research by seeking evidence for linguistic idiosyncratic influence on gender processing, however, from a within language comparison. Accordingly, it investigated the processing of gender information of Hebrew inanimate nouns from a foreign origin that do not have the typical morphologically complex Semitic structure of Hebrew nouns. The findings were evaluated in relation to previous findings derived from typical native Hebrew nouns. Gender processing was studied through the picture-word-interference (PWI) paradigm for estimating the gender-congruency effect induced by presenting a spoken distractor word of the same or of a different gender of the picture to be named. Across two experiments naming latency, for bare nouns (Exp. 1) and noun phrases (Exp. 2) revealed a different pattern of results from the pattern previously found for typical native inanimate Hebrew nouns-an inhibitory gender-congruency effect for feminine nouns only, but no congruency effect for masculine nouns. The unique pattern observed for this group of words reflects the high sensitivity of the linguistic system, in terms of gender processing, to the basic morphological structure of words. Thus, even within a language, the linguistic processor accommodates itself to item-specific properties. It is suggested that the specific pattern of the results reflects the attempt of the system to assimilate deviant forms within existing procedures on the basis of a flexible criterion of similarity.

Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production.

This study investigated the gender-congruency effect of animate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture-Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency revealed an inhibitory gender-congruency effect, as naming the pictures took longer in the presence of a gender-congruent distractor than with a distractor from a different gender category. The inhibitory effect was demonstrated for feminine (morphologically marked) nouns, across two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) (Experiments 1a and 1b), and masculine (morphologically unmarked) nouns (Experiment 2). The same pattern was observed when participants had to produce bare nouns (Experiment 1) or gender-marked noun phrases (Experiment 3). The inhibitory pattern of the effect resembles previous findings of bare nouns in a subset of Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish. These findings add to previous research which investigated the gender-congruency effect of inanimate nouns, where no effect of gender-congruent words was found. The results are discussed in relation to the null effect previously found for inanimate nouns. The comparison of the present and previous studies is motivated by a common linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in Hebrew, which ascribes grammatical gender specifications to derivational structures (for inanimate nouns) versus inflectional structures (for animate nouns). Given the difference in the notional meaning of gender specification for animate and inanimate nouns, the case of Hebrew exemplifies how language-specific characteristics, such as rich morphological structures, can be used by the linguistic system to express conceptual distinctions at the form-word level.

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements.

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112-143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants' eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.

Voles scale locomotion to the size of the open-field by adjusting the distance between stops: a possible link to path integration.

In this study we show that social voles (Microtus socialis guentheri) preserve the same level of activity and spatio-temporal organization of behavior whether exploring a small (1 x 1 m) or a large (2 x 2 m) open field. In each open field, a vole established a home base from which it set on to round-trips of exploration; taking fewer but longer trips in the large open field, compared with more frequent but shorter trips in the small open field. Each trip comprised bouts of progression (locomotion) interrupted by stops. The number of stops per trip was the same for both large open field (longer trips) and small open field (shorter trips), and achieved by scaling the distance between stops according to the size of the open field. Voles traveled more along the walls in the large compared with the small open field. These adjustments in locomotor behavior to open field size were observed immediately after the voles were introduced into the arena, indicating that the perceived distances available for locomotion were identified by the voles immediately at the beginning of exploration. It is suggested that these properties of spontaneous exploration are an expression of navigation using visual landmarks and path integration.