Effect of grammatical gender and semantic context on lexical access in Italian.

The interacting effects of sentence context and grammatical gender on lexical access were investigated in Italian using a timed picture-naming paradigm. Results showed large interacting effects of both sentence context and the gender of the article, with facilitation relative to two different control conditions. Repeat testing yielded an overall decrease in RT, but did not change the pattern of results. Results are interpreted in support of interactive activation models in which different sources of information are combined "on-line" to predict, anticipate or preactivate lexical targets.