Pronoun resolution in Italian: the role of grammatical gender and context.

The aim of this self-paced reading time study was to investigate the role of grammatical and context-based gender in assigning an antecedent to a pronoun when the antecedent was an epicene or a bi-gender noun. In Italian, epicene nouns (e.g., vittima, victim) have a grammatical gender while bi-gender nouns (e.g., erede, heir) do not have a grammatical gender and might acquire it from the context in which they occur. We designed three different types of context: Epicene-Incongruent contexts (i.e., contexts containing a gender bias that differed from the grammatical gender of epicenes), Epicene-Congruent contexts (i.e., contexts where the two gender levels coincide) and Neutral contexts. For epicenes, pronoun resolution was driven by the grammatical gender marked in the epicene’s representation. For bi-genders, pronoun resolution was driven by the gender assigned by context. The results are discussed in the light of current models of anaphor resolution.