Facilitation effects of gender-congruency in the production of Italian clitic pronouns

Abstract

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the visibility of the gender-congruency effect in noun-phrase production is language-constrained. Those languages (e.g., German) for which the determiner may be selected as early as the gender information is available (“early-selection languages”) show the effect. Those languages (e.g., Italian) for which the selection of the determiner also depends on phonological information of the following noun (“late-selection languages”) do not show any effect. However, there may be gender-marked forms, different from determiners, that meet the requisites for early selection, independently from the language to which they belong. In the picture–word interference experiment reported here we asked whether the production of gender-marked Italian pronouns, by virtue of requiring only gender information for their selection, may be sensitive to the gender-congruency effect. Results showed that participants were faster when the distractor was gender-congruent vs. incongruent with respect to the picture name. This finding supports the view that the visibility of the gender-congruency effect depends on the selection properties (early vs. late) of a given condition rather than of the language itself.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Early-selection
• Late-selection

Notes

¹Cubelli and collaborators have recently shown a gender-interference effect—that is, an effect opposite to gender-congruency, in bare noun production in both Italian and Spanish (Cubelli, Lotto, Paolieri, Girelli & Job 2005; Paolieri, Lotto, Leoncini, Cubelli & Job 2010a; Paolieri et al., 2010). Since these results and the ad-hoc developed theory do not directly bear on the issue addressed here, we do not comment further on the general impact of these findings.

²The vowel of singular proclitics may be elided when followed by a verb starting with the same vowel. That is, lo occupo “I occupy it: mas” can become “l'occupo”. This is a minor phonological modification with very different characteristics with respect to the alternation between masculine determiner forms: 1. It is always optional and strongly idiosyncratic; 2. It does not depend on the phonology of the referent; 3. It does not involve the use of different forms, but it is the same form whose final vowel is occasionally incorporated in the first of the following word. For all these reasons, the elision phenomenon should not have an impact on the possibility of early selection.