When words have two genders: Anaphor resolution for Italian functionally ambiguous words

Italian is an inflectionally very rich language. Gender is always marked in nouns, articles, and pronouns. A class of words, however, exists, defined by grammars as functionally ambiguous words or ''epicenes,'' in which a mismatch is possible between morphosyntactic gender and semantic gender (e.g., ia vittima, ''the victim''); they can in fact be used to refer to either a male or a female individual. Four experiments using self-paced reading times investigated the referential assignment process in short neutral sentences with anaphors whose antecedents were either epicenes or ungendered words, i.e., words for which no gender assignment is predictable from either the word ending or the article (e.g., l'erede, ''the heir''). A syntactic gender match advantage was observed for epicenes with pronouns (Experiment 1), proper names (Experiment 2), clitics (Experiment 3), and with a proper name inserted in a cataphoric position, i.e., before the referent (Experiment 4). The results show the relevance of morphosyntactic gender in the anaphor resolution process, suggesting that;ender information should be taken into account in theories of anaphor comprehension. (C) 1997 Academic Press.