Grammatical gender in the production of single words: some evidence from Greek

The present study investigated the effect of prior grammatical gender information provided by the production of a bare noun on the production of a syntactically unrelated, gender-inflected color adjective. The target language was Greek. A lexical priming task involving picture naming was employed. Participants saw a series of pictures, some in color and some in black-and-white; they had to name a black-and-white picture with the single noun (prime) and a color picture with the appropriately inflected color adjective (target). Prior gender information was shown to affect subsequent production of gender-marked words. The effect was restricted to nouns of one gender class (masculine) only. The implications of these results for the representation and processing of gender in production are discussed.