Processing reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (Person > Number > Gender) and implications for linguistic theory

In this paper we report results from four psycholinguistic experiments on the resolution of the Italian null subject pronoun (pro), supporting the view that different nominal phi-features have different degrees of cognitive strength, as implied by the Feature Hierarchy (Person>Number>Gender) [Universals of Language, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 73; Language 78 (2002) 482]. The experimental findings show that the processing penalty for forcing pro to retrieve a referent introduced in an object position—against pro’s antecedent preference for a referent introduced in a subject position—is significantly reduced when features higher on the Feature Hierarchy play a role in the disambiguation of the pronoun. This evidence provides support for recent proposals in the literature that assign different phi-features a different grammatical status in the core syntax. In particular, it argues for a special treatment in the syntax of 1st and 2nd person vs. 3rd along the lines of proposals such as Speas [Lingua], and for the representation of number, but not of gender, as an independent functional projection [Actes du deuxieme colloque ‘Langues et Grammaire’, Paris, p. 95].