Grammatical gender processing in romance languages: Evidence from bare noun production in Italian and Spanish

The selection of grammatical gender in bare noun production is a controversial topic. In two experiments with the picture–word interference paradigm we confirmed a reliable effect of grammatical gender congruency in bare noun production in Italian and we replicated this effect in Spanish, another Romance language with a gender system analogous to the Italian one. In both Experiments, naming times were slower for picture–word pairs sharing grammatical gender. The results of the present study support the notion that grammatical gender is an intrinsic lexical property and not a pure syntactic feature selected only in noun phrase production. We assume that grammatical gender selection is crucial in languages with a complex morphological structure, like Italian and Spanish, in which the ending vowel is itself marked for grammatical gender.