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Abstract
Pronominal agreement and grammatical agreement are distinguished. In particular, it is argued that pronominal agreement may involve the semantic interpretation of the formal gender feature of the pronoun independently from the interpretation of the gender feature of the antecedent. The vulnerability of lexicalsyntactic information concerning the gender of the antecedent is also considered. Two experiments are reported which explore the possibility of [+animate] nouns being gender invariable in Portuguese and information is provided regarding the natural gender (sex) of the gender invariable antecedent of the pronoun. The effect of grammatical gender/natural gender congruence upon the processing of pronominal forms is investigated. In the fist experiment, the sentences of the pair are contiguous and in the second one, the distance between antecedent and pronoun is enlarged. The results of Exp. 1 suggest that lexicalsyntactic information prevails though the processing of pronominal reference is facilitated when there is semantic information compatible with the semantic interpretation of the gender of the pronoun. The results of Exp 2 suggest that pronominal reference can be solved on a semantic basis when information concerning the grammatical gender of the linguistic antecedent is not available. The results are compatible with a model of sentence processing which predicts integrative processes at the end of the sentence. They also contribute to the creation of a discourse-processing model that expresses how cohesive relationships involving pronominal forms can be established.
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