Maria De Martino

The activation of grammatical gender information in processing Italian nouns

The present research addresses the issue of whether the orthographic-phonological information about gender provided by Italian affixes affects the processing of single nouns. In six experiments, transparent nouns (Italian feminine nouns ending in “-a”) were compared with irregular nouns (Italian masculine nouns ending in “a”). We tested the assumption that when the orthographic-phonological information displayed in the gender suffix of a noun is inconsistent with the syntactic information about noun gender, lexical processing is slower and less accurate. The tasks employed (reading aloud, on-line inflection, and lexical decision) require different degrees of explicit linguistic knowledge and involve both recognition and production mechanisms. The data are consistent with a pattern already reported in literature: transparent nouns are processed faster and better than irregular nouns. The results allow the conclusion that lexical processing of single nouns is affected by the manner in which grammatical gender is expressed in the surface form of nouns.

Regularity and/or Consistency in the Production of the Past Participle?.

In the present study we have investigated the acquisition of the past participle of Italian verbs of the second (including mostly irregular verbs) and third (including mostly regular verbs) conjugations in school age children, and with simulations with an artificial neural network. We aimed to verify the extent to which children are sensitive to regularity, as opposed to the consistency in the mapping from the infinitive to the past participle. In particular, we predicted that children would learn at some point that verbs of the second conjugation tend to be irregular, and therefore they would be more likely to produce irregularizations for verbs of this class, compared to the verbs of the third conjugation. However, they should also show sensitivity to the phonological mapping consistency within each subclass, learning to produce correct forms on the basis of phonological similarity. In contrast, children should be more likely to produce regular forms for verbs of the third conjugation. Thus, a larger regularity effect would be expected for verbs of the third than of the second conjugation, leading to the prediction of a regularity by conjugation interaction.

Representation of grammatical properties of Italian verbs in the mental lexicon

The present study focuses on the representation of verbs in the Italian mental lexicon and investigates some grammatical properties: inflectional class, mood, tense, and person. Two experiments based on free recall of single inflected forms are reported. The patterns of recall and error are taken as evidence for the grammatical and morphological information exploited in the access to the verb forms. The pattern of results provides support for the hypothesis that in the mental lexicon the information about conjugation and mood is an organizational criterion for the representation of verbal forms. An interaction between mood and conjugation, likely to arise from the difference in productivity between conjugations, is also observed.