De Martino, M. & Laudanna, A.
University of Salerno
Lexical processing of nouns is affected by information about their grammatical gender. Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether the effect of gender depends on orthographic-phonological (the surface form), or on morphological factors (the activation of the inflectional paradigm). This problem is crucial for Italian nouns, since their inflectional ending simultaneously incorporates information about Gender (G), Number and Declensional Class (DC). In a lexical decision task with the priming paradigm we exploited experimental conditions where the surface forms of prime and target were kept under control and the mismatch of information about their G and DC was manipulated. The aim was to investigate the specific role of DC. Reaction times were slower when prime and target did not share G and DC. The simple mismatch of G induced a higher number of errors. Results are compatible with two explanations: i) the pre-activation of grammatical information (G and DC) inhibits the lexical processing of nouns with incongruent grammatical information; ii) a hierarchical relation holds between G and DC, where G is superordinate to DC. In this last case, effects of DC should be observed in presence of G effects, but effects of G would not imply DC effects.