Grammatical gender is selected in bare noun production: Evidence from the picture–word interference paradigm

Abstract

Most current models of language production assume that information about gender is selected only in phrasal contexts, and that the phonological form of a noun can be accessed without selecting its syntactic properties. In this paper, we report a series of picture–word interference experiments with Italian-speaking participants where the grammatical gender of nouns and the phonological transparency of suffixes have been manipulated. The results showed a consistent and robust effect of grammatical gender in the production of bare nouns. Naming times were slower to picture–word pairs sharing the same grammatical gender. As reported in studies with Romance languages, the gender congruity effect disappeared when participants were required to produce the noun preceded by the definite determiner. Our results suggest that the selection of grammatical gender reflects a competitive process preceding the access to morpho-phonological forms and that it is mandatory, i.e., it occurs also when the noun has to be produced outside a sentential context.