The production of pronominal clitics: implications for theories of lexical access.

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., ‘‘portalo’’ (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We found that pronominal clitic production is sensitive to the frequency of the noun it replaces. This result locates the effect of word frequency in lexical access at the level where a word’s grammatical features are represented. In Experiments 2, 3A, and 3B we used a picture-word interference naming task and found that the gender of a distractor word does not affect the production of gender-marked clitics. This result, together with those of Experiments 3A and 3B, which show a semantic interference effect and the absence of a phonological facilitation effect in clitic production, respectively, allows the inference that the retrieval of grammatical gender is an automatic consequence of lexical node selection and not an independent selection process that operates on the principle of selection-by-activation level.