GenLab was in the PuG conference!

This year, GenLab was in Heidelberg for Psychologie und Gehirn (PuG) 2026, and we brought two posters along.

The first, presented by our PhD student Rasmus Sinn, introduces the design of his very first experiments (the opening chapter of his GenPath journey). His preregistered ERP study asks a simple question: how sensitive is the reading brain to the little form-based clues that hint at a noun's gender? German is an ideal "object of research", because its noun endings predict gender to very different degrees. By presenting German sentences word by word and time-locking brain responses to critical nouns, Rasmus explores whether we (our brains) rely on a form-based (sublexical) route to retrieve gender as we read.

The second poster, presented by Ana Rita Sá-Leite, brings to Heidelberg our recently published work in Brain and Language (read the paper). Combining the classic picture–word interference paradigm with EEG, it shows that gender is retrieved early during lexical access and does not need an agreement context to appear in European Portuguese. Even more intriguingly, this retrieval looks different for masculine and feminine nouns; an interesting asymmetry hiding in the brain's electrical signals.