Running head: SYNTAX AND FORM IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION Syntax and Form in Language Production: An Investigation of Gender Agreement in Romance Languages

In the current paper, we assess whether morphophonological information (consistent, inconsistent or ambiguous with the syntactic information) affects syntactic encoding. We report four experiments (one in Italian, one in French and two in Spanish) in which we elicited gender agreement errors between the subject of a sentence and a predicative adjective using the same methodology used by Vigliocco and Franck (1999). In the experiments, we manipulated the mapping between morphophonological marking and syntactic gender within each language. The results of these experiments indicate a role, consistent with the distributional properties of the language, for morphophonological marking in the agreement process.