When sex and syntax go hand in hand: Gender agreement in language production

In four experiments (two in French and two in Italian), we investigated whe ther the language production system uses conceptual information regarding b iological gender in the encoding of gender agreement between a subject and a predicate. Both French and Italian have a nominal gender system that incl udes a distinction between nouns reflecting the sex of the referent (concep tual gender) and nouns for which the gender does not reflect the sex of the referent (grammatical gender). The experiments used a constrained sentence completion task (Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995). In Experiments 1 (Italian) and 2 (French) we found that errors in the agreement of gender between the subject and the predicate were more common when the subject hea d noun did not have any conceptual correlates. Experiments 3 and 4 establis hed that the advantage for conceptual gender in the first two studies canno t be explained by the difference in animacy between nouns with conceptual g ender (referring to humans and animals) and nouns with grammatical gender ( referring to objects), (C) 1999 Academic Press.