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 always processed during language production even when gender information is not needed for the speech output. Here, we report a picture-word interference study with Slovak speakers naming pictures with bare nouns while ignoring gender-congruent or incongruent distractor words. Both naming latencies and the electroencephalogram were recorded. As predicted, 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 by naming latencies when gender information is not required for the utterance format.