We examined whether a context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homophone words in French. Homophones whose different meanings are associated with words of different genders (e.g., /s εl/, meaning salt masculine or saddle feminine ) were used in two cross- modal semantic priming experiments. In the first experiment, in which homophones were presented in isolation, facilitation was found for targets related to both the masculine (e.g., "poivre", pepper ) and the feminine (e.g., "cheval", horse ) meanings of the homophones. In the second experiment, in which homophones were presented with a gender-marked definite article (e.g., /las εl/, the saddle ), facilitation was found for targets related to the meaning matching the gender information given by the article (e.g., "cheval"). No facilitation was found for targets related to the meaning mismatching the gender information (e.g., "poivre"). These findings are discussed in relation to the locus of the gender-context effect and the representation of homophone words.
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