Grammatical Gender Is on the Tip of Italian Tongues

To correctly produce words, speakers must have access to three broad classes of information lexical semantics, syntax, and sound structure The relevant information must be organized in ways that permit rapid and accurate retrieval of specific lexical targets Current models of language production do this by a two-stage process The first stage incorporates lexical meanings and syntax, and the second, sound structure We used studies of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (i e, the condition in which a speaker cannot produce a well-known word) to evaluate this organization and in so doing, we provide the first clear experimental evidence for a lexical stage that includes syntax and is distinct from both sound structure and the conceptual correlates of syntactic features.