Grammatical gender in Slovak word production: An event-related potential study

During word production, speakers regularly need to retrieve relevant lexico-syntactic features like grammatical gender. It is still unclear, however, whether grammatical gender is automatically processed during language production even when its information is not needed for the word form encoding of the speech output (see Wang & Schiller, 2019 for a review). To add novel evidence to this debate, we conducted a picture-word interference study during which Slovak speakers named pictures while ignoring gender-congruent or incongruent distractor words. Naming latencies and the electroencephalogram of participants were recorded. As predicted, bare noun naming latencies did not differ between conditions, while the gender-incongruent condition evoked larger voltage amplitudes at the electrophysiological level. We observed a P300-like effect that was modulated by gender congruency. These results suggest that grammatical gender is always processed during Slovak speech production but that its selection can either be bypassed or is not detected in the naming latencies when gender information is not required for the utterance format.