The activation of grammatical gender information in processing Italian nouns

The present research addresses the issue of whether the orthographic-phonological information about gender provided by Italian affixes affects the processing of single nouns. In six experiments, transparent nouns (Italian feminine nouns ending in “-a”) were compared with irregular nouns (Italian masculine nouns ending in “a”). We tested the assumption that when the orthographic-phonological information displayed in the gender suffix of a noun is inconsistent with the syntactic information about noun gender, lexical processing is slower and less accurate. The tasks employed (reading aloud, on-line inflection, and lexical decision) require different degrees of explicit linguistic knowledge and involve both recognition and production mechanisms. The data are consistent with a pattern already reported in literature: transparent nouns are processed faster and better than irregular nouns. The results allow the conclusion that lexical processing of single nouns is affected by the manner in which grammatical gender is expressed in the surface form of nouns.