A distinction among phi- features: The role of gender and number in the retrieval of pronoun antecedents

We investigated the use of gender and number in pronoun antecedents identification in six experiments in Italian. In a previous work we found that 1000 msec after the presentation of a pronoun only number information is used to restrict the set of possible antecedents of a pronoun, while gender information is not. Here we add two experiments with onset of the target word at 500 msec, which show that neither number nor gender are used. The conclusion is that while number information is used between 500 and 1000 msec to restrict the activation of pronoun antecedent, gender is not. This in turn points to a difference in the syntactic representation of these two features.