The gender congruity effect:: Evidence from Spanish and Catalan

In five picture-word interference experiments we explore the gender congruity effect observed in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Participants' performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender of 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 language, depending on crucial characteristics of the gender/determiner selection system used to process a given language. Consistent with the crosslinguistic hypothesis presented by Miozzo and Caramazza we argue that the retrieval 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.