386 words selected for this study: three phonological factors (number of syllables, word length in milliseconds, presence/absence of an initial vowel), four semantic factors (concreteness, humanness, animacy and semantic gender), subjective word frequency (rati ngs from 1\endash 7), grammatical gender, and a number of related characteristics that require further explanation, including marker-gender mismatch, generic nouns, diminutives, and abstract action nominals.

The 386 words were recorded by a female native speaker of Bulgarian, in a neutral intonation with a falling tone, digitized using the Macintosh SoundEdit system, and placed in a sound file within the PsyScope experiment preparation package developed by MacWhinney et al. at Carnegie Mellon University. For each item, the reaction time was measured from the onset of the stimulus word to the subject's response (as measured from the onset of the vocal response in word repetition, and from the button press in gender monitoring). A complete list of word stimuli is available in an Appendix on our website.