In search of gender recency: Evidence from the production of pronouns

This study investigated whether retrieval of a noun's grammatical gender be nefits fr om having retrieved that information recently. bt response to pic ture stimuli, participants produced gender marked pronouns under various pr iming conditions. The primes differed in that they either necessitated retr ieval of grammatical gender (indefinite norm phrase/pronoun) or did not (no un) when they required gender retrieval, they varied in whether they involv ed access to the same morpheme (pronoun) or a different morpheme (indefinit e noun phrase). Relative to an unprimed condition, faster responses were ob tained in each condition. Pronoun primes facilitated pronoun naming more th an the other prime types, but no difference was observed between noun prime s and indefinite noun. phrase primes. Thus although the experiment was sens itive to priming processes, there was no evidence for morpheme-independent gender priming.