Lexical retrieval and grammatical gender

In order to better exemplify how speakers retrieve GG from the lexicon, it is useful to spend a few words on the psycholinguistic model of lexical activation. There is now wide agreement on some fundamental ideas first presented by Levelt (1989)²⁶: speakers

26 While some core ideas of Levelt´s (1989) proposal have received much support, others were criticized and rejected within the scientific community; in particular, I will briefly touch upon the discussion about

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progressively access lexical entries through semantic and lexical selection, finally resulting in the activation of the corresponding phonological nodes. In Levelt´s (1989) view, activation flows through at least three different types of nodes (or levels) of representation: first, the speaker must decide which kind of conceptual information he or she intends to communicate and activate the corresponding semantic representation. As a second step, activation flows to the lexical level, where lexical selection takes place: more lexical nodes might activate simultaneously in response to the semantic intention, but only the most relevant lemma will be selected. At this point, grammatical information attached to the lemma is retrieved: among it, lexical class and gender in the case of nouns, or argument structure in the case of verbs. The last step corresponds to the activation of the fitting phonological nodes composing the retrieved lexeme.

The original proposal formulated by Levelt (1989) was actually modified in a number of subsequent works (see Indefrey & Levelt, 2004). For instance, much debate concerned whether lemma should refer to the entries in the syntactic or in the semantic lexicon (or both), and whether the syntactic content is always activated in lexical retrieval.

The base-line model described above was enriched in order to account for the process of word retrieval as well as for word reading and for word oral comprehension. However, for the sake of the current discussion, it is not necessary to enter the details of the discussion. It will be sufficient to consider that most proposals reproduce the relevant partition between the conceptual system, the semantic, the syntactic and the phonological levels, and maintain the core structure proposed by Levelt for the activation of the different levels (see Friedmann, Biran & Dotan, 2013, for an overview).

A much-debated aspect in Levelt’s proposal concerns the role of syntactic information in lexical retrieval. With respect to this, Caramazza (1997) adopts the idiom syntactic mediation in order to describe the intermediate position of syntactic information within the lexical retrieval process proposed by Levelt (1989), thus explicitly referring to the role of syntactic information as mediator between semantic and phonology: syntactic retrieval follows semantic activation and precedes phonological activation.

Results from studies based on the elicitation and observation of TOT-states, were indeed interpreted as proof of grammatical activation preceding phonological activation.

the number of levels and nodes that should be activated in order to succeed in the correct activation of the target noun.

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For Italian, Vigliocco et al. (1997) and Badecker et al. (1995) observe that both unimpaired and anomic speakers show gender congruency or gender knowledge despite ineffective lexical retrieval. Authors also explain the phenomena as due to the privileged status of GG with respect to phonology in the process of lexical retrieval, and they ascribe speakers’ failure to an insufficient activation of the phonological level, while semantic and syntactic activation are completed successfully.

Caramazza (1997) and Caramazza and Miozzo (1997) reject the idea of phonological activation depending on the previous successful retrieval of grammatical information. Authors further support their view by calling into cause cases of healthy and aphasic speakers that have level-specific impairment in different tasks requiring the retrieval of phonological or morpho-syntactic information. Authors analyse results from naming tasks, and focus on the information participants can provide in TOT-states: in some cases they provide both GG and phonological information (e.g., number of syllables, first and/or last phoneme, etc.), in others only either one of the two. The case in which they provide GG but no phonological information is compatible with the hypothesis of a syntactic mediation between the semantic and the phonological level;

however, the opposite pattern with phonological information but no clue about GG is not.

Researchers propose then a slightly modified version of Levelt´s (1989) model for lexical access, in which the difference between lemma and lexeme is neutralized, and they claim the exclusive existence of single lexemes in the form of abstract nodes mediating between the semantic and the phonological or orthographic forms of a word and connecting to grammatical information.

The debate on the actual structure of lexical entries and the process for their retrieval is very rich. However, for the sake of the present discussion, what really matters is the presence of information record for GG within the lexicon. Most researchers now agree on it (Alexiadou, 2004; Badecker et al., 1995; Caramazza, 1997; Caramazza and Miozzo, 1997; Friedmann and Biran, 2003; Levelt, 1989, Vigliocco et al., 1997).

Alexiadou (2004) agrees with the general assumption that GG is recorded in the lexicon and retrieved from it along with the lexemes, but she also points out that exceptions to this general mechanism exist. The author in particular refers to word pairs that receive their gender specification contextually. That is precisely the case of word pairs of the type ragazzo/ragazza ('boy'/'girl'), which realize a gender opposition based

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on the final vowel marker: -o for nouns denoting masculine entities, and -a for their feminine counterparts. The kind of noun that shows this type of gender alternation is usually specified for the [+animate] feature. Non-animate nouns do not have such alternations. For those noun pairs, gender is assigned contextually, depending on the animate referent they are linked to: the natural gender of the animate referent is then copied on the noun in form of grammatical gender. The locus of gender assignment for nouns referring to animate or human referents remains unspecified in Alexiadou (2004) and in Alexiadou et al. (2007). According to Di Domenico (1997) gender assignment for otherwise unspecified nouns takes place in the numeration, short after lexical items are selected and before they enter the syntactic derivation.

The subdivision of nouns into two categories, those with specified intrinsic gender and those with referent-dependent gender finds support in the psycholinguistic research:

Franzon et al. (2014) administrate a phrase completion task to 24 unimpaired speakers of Italian. Participants examine adjective-noun pairs; in each couple, either one of the two elements lacks the ending morpheme and participants are requested to complete it. Their performance is measured according to reaction times and accuracy: a significant difference between nouns with intrinsic GG and those with contextually dependent GG emerges. Namely, subjects perform faster and more accurately on nouns that contextually receive gender specification, even though this is considered to be the least common procedure among nouns, being the majority of words intrinsically specified for gender (Franzon et al., 2014).

Summing up, in the present paragraph, I reviewed a number of studies on gender that point out the complex amount of abilities and factors involved in the process of GG retrieval. For instance, the capacity to inhibit alternatives and to address selective attention in case of incongruent information with respect to natural gender both co-operate in order to achieve the activation of the target GG. I also presented the double route that speakers can take to reach their goal: either they retrieve GG from the word-form or they recover it directly from the lexicon. This last route builds on the assumption that the feature for GG is stored in the lexicon at the lemma level and is activated, according to Levelt’s model (1989), along with grammatical information and prior to the phonetic word form. In the next paragraphs, I will further explore GG retrieval from a different point of view, namely the neural substrates that carry out the task.

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