Cover not available

Article published In: The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:1 (2017) ► pp.107–128

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

The influence of grammatical gender and suffix transparency in processing Italian written nouns

 | University of Salerno, Italy
 | University of Salerno, Italy
 | University of Salerno, Italy
 | University of Salerno, Italy
Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.12.1.05dem
Abstract
In some languages the grammatical gender of nouns can be probabilistically detected using formal cues; for instance, in Italian, the majority of feminine nouns end in ‘-a’(e.g., casa, ‘home’) and the majority of masculine nouns end in ‘-o’ (e.g., albero, ‘tree’). It has been hypothesized that the match/mismatch between the formal information of the suffix and the abstract grammatical information on gender affects lexical processing of nouns. An alternative account is that a default option available for gender poses constraints to mechanisms of lexical access for words exhibiting gender markers in the surface form.
In the present study, nouns with highly predictive gender suffix (regular), nouns whose gender cannot be recovered from surface form (opaque) and nouns with misleading gender suffix (irregular) were compared in two reading aloud and two lexical decision experiments. Results confirmed that regular nouns are processed better than irregular nouns. No difference was detected between masculine and feminine opaque nouns.
The results allow the conclusion that a formal gender feature (the gender orthographic regularity) is more likely to affect lexical processing of bare nouns than the activation of a gender default option.
Article outline
  • Grammatical gender and lexical processing
  • Grammatical gender in Italian
  • Experiment 1
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Equipment
      • Procedure
    • Results
  • Experiment 2
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Equipment
      • Procedure
    • Results
  • Interim discussion
  • Experiment 3
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure and equipment
    • Results
  • Experiment 4
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Stimuli
      • Procedure and equipment
    • Results
  • Interim discussion 2
  • General discussion
  • Note
  • References
References (35)
References
Bates, E., Devescovi, A., Hernandez, A., & Pizzamiglio, L. (1996). Gender priming in Italian. Perception & Psychophysics, 581, 992–1004. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bertinetto, P. M., Burani, C., Laudanna, A., Marconi, L., Ratti, D., Rolando, C., & Thornton, A. M. (2005). Corpus e Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano Scritto (CoLFIS). [URL]
Bordag, D., & Pechmann, T. (2007). Factors influencing L2 gender processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 101, 299–314. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bordag, D., Opitz, A., & Pechmann, T. (2006). Gender processing in first and second languages: The role of noun termination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 321, 1090–1101.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caramazza, A. (1997). How many levels of processing are there in lexical access?. Cognitive neuropsychology, 141, 177–208. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caramazza, A., & Miozzo, M. (1997). The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: evidence from the tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon. Cognition, 641, 309–343. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1998). How lexical semantics constrains inflectional allomorphy. In Yearbook of Morphology 1997, 1–24. Springer Netherlands. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caselli, M. C. Leonard, L., Volterra, V., & Campagnoli, M. G. (1993). Toward mastery of Italian morphology: A cross-sectional study. Journal of Child Language, 201, 377–393. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chini, M. (1995). Genere grammaticale e acquisizione. Aspetti della morfologia nominale in italiano L2. Milano: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Colé, P., Pynte, J. & Andriamamonjy, P. (2003). Effect of grammatical gender on visual word recognition: Evidence from lexical decision and eye movement experiments. Perception & Psychophysics, 651, 407–419. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cubelli, R., Lotto, L., Paolieri, D., Girelli, M., & Job, R. (2005). Grammatical gender is selected in bare noun production: Evidence from the picture – word interference paradigm. Journal of Memory and Language, 531, 42–59. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dardano, M., & Trifone, M. (1985). La lingua italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Martino, M., & Laudanna, A. (2012). Il genere dei nomi italiani: dati sperimentali e distribuzionali, in S. Ferreri (Ed.), Lessico e Lessicologia (pp. 343–354). Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Martino, M., Bracco, G., & Laudanna, A. (2011). The activation of grammatical gender information in processing Italian nouns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 261, 745–776. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Di Domenico, E. (1997). Per una teoria del genere grammaticale. Padova: Unipress.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Franceschina, F. (2001). Morphological or syntactic deficits in near-native speakers? An assessment of some current proposals. Second Language Research, 171, 213–247. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gollan, T. H., & Frost, R. (2001). Two routes to grammatical gender: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 301, 627–651. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grosjean, F., Dommergues, .J. Y., Cornu, E., Guillelmon, D., & Besson, C. (1994). The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition. Perception and Psychophysics, 561, 590–598. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guillelmon, D., & Grosjean, F. (2001). The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals. Memory and Cognition, 291, 503–511. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halle, M., & Marantz, A. (1994). Some key features of Distributed Morphology. MIT working papers in linguistics, 211, 275–288.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harley, H., & Ritter, E. (2002). Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language, 781, 482–526. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, J. W. (1991). The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 221, 27–62.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hernandez, A. E., Kotz, S. A., Hofmann, J., Valentin, V. V., Dapretto, M., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2004). The neural correlates of grammatical gender decisions in Spanish. Neuroreport, 151, 863–866. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Matthews, C. (2010). On the nature of phonological cues in the acquisition of French gender categories: Evidence from instance-based learning models. Lingua, 1201, 879–900. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCarthy, C. (2008). Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: An argument for representation over computation. Second Language Research, 241, 459–486. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Padovani, R., & Cacciari, C. (2003). Il ruolo della trasparenza morfologica nel riconoscimento di parole in italiano. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 41, 749–771.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paolieri, D., Lotto, L., Leoncini, D., Cubelli, R., & Job, R. (2011). Differential effects of grammatical gender and gender inflection in bare noun production. British Journal of Psychology, 1021, 19–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, M. (1991). The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children tell us. Journal of Child Language, 181, 571–590. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1998). Words and rules. Lingua, 1061, 219–242. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Postiglione, F., De Martino, M., Bracco, G., & Laudanna, A. (2014). Frequency distribution of inflectional classes and grammatical gender: a lexical database for Italian nouns. Poster presented at Secondo Convegno Interannuale della Società di Linguistica Italiana (SLI): Teorie e approcci usage-based in linguistica.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serianni, L. (1988). Grammatica italiana. Italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Suoni, forme, costrutti. Torino: Utet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spinelli, E., Meunier, F. & Seigneuric, A. (2006). Spoken word recognition with gender-marked context. The Mental Lexicon, 11, 277–297. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taft, M., & Meunier, F. (1998). Lexical representation of gender: A quasi-regular domain. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 271, 23–45. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I. & Hulk, A. (2013) Grammatical gender and the notion of default: Insights from language acquisition. Lingua, 1371, 128–144. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
White, L., Valenzuela, E., Kozlowsk-Macgregor, M., & Leung, Y. K. I. (2004). Gender and number agreement in non native Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 251, 105–133. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (10)

Cited by ten other publications

Breimaier, Federica & Chiara Zanini
2025. On the perception of the masculine-neuter contrast in Maceratese. Morphology 35:1 ► pp. 51 ff. DOI logo
Sá-Leite, A. R. & S. Lago
2024. The role of word form in gender processing during lexical access: A theoretical review and novel proposal in language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 31:5 ► pp. 1934 ff. DOI logo
Sá-Leite, Ana Rita, Ian Craig Simpson, Isabel Fraga & Montserrat Comesaña
2024. A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages. Acta Psychologica 246 ► pp. 104236 ff. DOI logo
Pescuma, Valentina Nicole, Chiara Zanini, Davide Crepaldi & Francesca Franzon
2021. Form and Function: A Study on the Distribution of the Inflectional Endings in Italian Nouns and Adjectives. Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo
Russo, Andrea G., Fabrizio Esposito, Alessandro Laudanna, Azzurra Mancuso, Francesco Di Salle, Annibale Elia & Maria De Martino
2021. The neural substrate of noun morphological inflection: A rapid event-related fMRI study in Italian. Neuropsychologia 151 ► pp. 107699 ff. DOI logo
Paolieri, Daniela, Josep Demestre, Marc Guasch, Teresa Bajo & Pilar Ferré
2020. The gender congruency effect in Catalan–Spanish bilinguals: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23:5 ► pp. 1045 ff. DOI logo
Sá-Leite, Ana Rita, Karlos Luna, Isabel Fraga & Montserrat Comesaña
2020. The gender congruency effect across languages in bilinguals: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 27:4 ► pp. 677 ff. DOI logo
Velnić, Marta
2020. Acquisition of a Transparent Gender System: A Comparison of Italian and Croatian. Frontiers in Psychology 11 DOI logo
De Martino, Maria, Azzurra Mancuso & Alessandro Laudanna
2017. Variabili Rilevanti nella Rappresentazione delle Parole nel Lessico Mentale: Dati Psicolinguistici da una Banca-Dati di Nomi e Verbi Italiani. In Proceedings of the Fourth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2017, ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2024. The Frequency-Grammar Interface [Bilingual Processing and Acquisition, 20], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue