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

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 res...