The Influence of Gender Information on Written Language Production

The authors report on a gender priming experiment in German using typewritten language production in a picture naming task. The experiment was conducted with 20 native speakers of German with a wide range of typing skills. In the gender primed condition, gender information was provided by presenting and naming the definite German determiner before the picture naming task. The unprimed condition consisted only of the picture naming task. Picture naming was done by producing the bare noun. In the analysis of the initial latencies, no difference between the primed and the unprimed condition was found. However, in the analysis of the writing time (e. g. the time needed from the first to the last keystroke of word production – excluding the initial latency and the key) a significant priming effect (55 ms faster writing times in the primed condition) was obtained. We argue that this effect might be due to facilitation in lexical retrieval processes during word production in the gender primed condition. The source (whether facilitation stems from gender or from context information) and the localization of the effect (in terms of syllable and morpheme boundaries) within the word still has to be identified.