Finocchiaro, C. 1, 2 & Nevins, A. 3
1 Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), Università degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy
2 Department of Education and Cognitive Science (DiSCoF), Università degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy
3 Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London UK
The research on the selection of grammatical gender has been mostly concentrated on single words or words in agreement, often ignoring the impact of conceptual gender. The objective of the present study is to explore the mechanism of gender selection for gender-marked elements that are not in agreement; and to verify whether the possible benefit of sharing gender is different for those entities that are also marked for conceptual gender. We elicited the production of sentences with direct and indirect Italian clitic objects (e.g., gliela porta ‘to her it:FEM, [he/she] brings’) in response to strings of visually presented words. We manipulated the gender of the direct and indirect object (masc vs. fem), and the animacy of the indirect object (animate, e.g., “to the sister” vs. inanimate, e.g., “to the shop”). Results showed a significant effect of gender congruency: gender-congruent trials were more accurate and faster than gender-incongruent trials. In addition, the effect of congruency tended to be larger for animate trials than for inanimate trials (RTs analysis only). These findings may suggest that (1) the gender selection mechanism is sensitive to all the values of internal verbal arguments; (2) conceptually motivated gender may “intrude” onto the selection mechanism.