Differences between the morphology of gender and number: Evidence from establishing coreferences

This work investigates the processing of gender and number features in the selection of a pronoun antecedent in Italian. In Italian there are instance s of nouns in which gender and number are treated morphologically on a par, i.e., overtly and regularly marked by a suffix. In these cases, are the tw o features also treated similarly in processing? The experiments used sente nces with two possible antecedents (differing in gender or number) in the m ain Clause and a pronoun in the complement clause. The sentences were visua lly presented, with a unimodal lexical decision task at the end of the sent ence. The results showed a selective reactivation of the the antecedent mat ching the pronoun in either gender or number. The results are discussed in relation to previous Italian experiments, which found that in sentence inte rnal position there is selective reactivation of only the number-matching a ntecedent. They are taken to support a model of the coreference processor i n which gender and number features are used at different processing stages, due to their different syntactic representation.