Gender Processing in Speech Production: Evidence from German Speech Errors

The present study investigates the relationship between gender processing and the properties of speech errors. Studying German noun substitution errors it was found that intended and intruded nouns were more often of the same grammatical gender than one would expect by chance (“identical gender effect”). In the present study, German slips of the tongue were investigated on the assumption that the occurrence of the identical gender effect depends on the processing level, where the error arises. The syntactic context preceding errors of nonidentical gender was also explored. In the German language, interactions of nonidentical gender nouns often result in agreement violations. It can be shown that gender congruency between nouns and preceding articles also depends on the processing level at which the noun error occurs. The results are consistent with two-stage models of lexical retrieval and speech production, according to which the syntactic information of a noun is only represented during the first stage of lexical access.