The gender congruity effect: Evidence from Spanish and Catalan

In five picture-word interference experiments we explore the gender congrui ty effect observed in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Particip ants' performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender o f the picture and the gender of the word. The results show that the gender congruity effect is not a universal effect, but varies from language to lan guage, depending on crucial characteristics of the gender/determiner select ion system used to process a given language. Consistent with the crosslingu istic hypothesis presented by Miozzo and Caramazza we argue that the retrie val of the noun's gender is enough to specify the determiner's phonological form in Dutch, but not in Catalan or Spanish, and this is the cause of the failure to replicate the Dutch results in these two languages.