Psychological evidence on the status of Romance clitics

Romance clitics are remarkably similar to elements which are assumed to have a different status according to the linguistic analysis: determiners and affixes. Because of this, it is unsurprising that the status of clitics has been one of the more debated topics in the field over the past decades. This paper will take a psycholinguistic approach in order to broaden the domain of investigation. Though Psycholinguistics cannot 'go into' the linguistic debate, it may still provide additional data that may 'go with' linguistic data. Here, two issues concerning Italian pronominal clitics are addressed: (a) the 'shared representation hypothesis', according to which third person object clitics and definite articles share their lexical representation; (b) the psychological processing of clitics with respect to the classes of affixes and free-standing grammatical morphemes. On the basis of experimental findings, it will be argued against the view that third person object clitics and determiners are retrieved from the same lexical entry in Italian. Moreover, some psycholinguistic evidence is provided suggesting that Italian enclitics may be assimilated to affixes, whereas Italian proclitics may be assimilated to free-standing morphemes. Results are in line with the well known asymmetries between the linguistic behavior of enclitics and proclitics.