Processing Grammatical Gender During Language Comprehension

The paper reviews empirical evidence on the processing of grammatical gender during language comprehension, mainly focusing on gender priming. Evidence comes from behavioral experiments investigating gender priming and from behavioral as well as neurophysiological experiments evaluating the interaction of gender priming with semantic information. While the behavioral data do not provide a completely unambiguous picture, the neurophysiological data and the most reliable behavioral effects are more in line with a modular than with an interactive view of lexical access.