The Absence of a Gender Congruency Effect in Romance Languages: A Matter of Stimulus Onset Asynchrony

Using the picture–word interference paradigm, H. Schriefers and E. Teruel (2000) found that in German the grammatical gender of the distractor word affects the production of phrases composed of articlepicture name: Latencies were longer for picture–word pairs of different genders. However, the effect was found only at positive stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; i.e., when pictures were pre-sented 75 or 150 ms earlier than word distractors). This gender congruency effect is not obtained in Romance languages. The present article examines whether in these languages, as in German, the effect appears at positive SOAs. No effect was observed in Italian and Spanish at positive SOAs. An account is proposed to explain why the gender congruency effect is obtained in Germanic (Dutch and German) but not in Romance languages. In the picture–word interference paradigm, participants are asked to name a picture (or a color) and ignore a word appearing concomitantly. Naming latencies increase significantly as an effect of distractor presentation. Word distractors are believed to disrupt the process of word production; and consistent with this hypoth-esis, the picture–word interference paradigm is viewed as a