Gender-to-ending consistency and agreement processing in Italian: two independent effects?

Behavioral studies on gender-to-ending consistency in Romance language showed that people take advantage of these word-form cues when judging gender identity or agreement. However, it is still unclear when the linguistic processor identifies word-ending cues to gender, and whether this information affects syntactic agreement processing. This ERP study investigated the time course of gender agreement processing with Italian nouns whose word ending was a reliable or a misleading cue to gender (transparent, irregular nouns). The nouns were preceded by gender agreeing or disagreeing determiners and were embedded in sentences. The ERPs on target nouns showed main effects of Transparency and Gender Agreement. Specifically, transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity (350-750 ms) and a posterior positivity (750-950 ms) compared to irregular nouns. This suggests that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from early stages of processing and that this information remains available until later processing stages. In addition, gender agreement violations evoked a LAN (350-500 ms) followed by a P600 (550-950 ms). The lack of interaction between Agreement and Transparency suggests that agreement processing is relatively unaffected by gender-to-ending consistency.