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, 2009). More recently however it has been claimed that retrieval cues during language processing are not always equally weighted (Van Dyke and McElree, 2011; Dillon et al., 2013). For example, Dillon et al. claimed that syntactic binding constraints constitute ��hard constraints�� that restrict retrieval to syntactically licit antecedents. We argued that the most obvious kind of evidence that the c-command constraint and gender congruence combine equally to guide retrieval would be from facilitatory interference effects similar to those observed for subject-verb agreement. However, we failed to observe this pattern of results in Experiment 4. Although we failed to observe facilitatory interference, Badecker and Straub (2002) reported a different type of inhibitory interference in a series of self-paced reading experiments. They observed longer reading times when multiple antecedents matched in gender with a reflexive or pronoun compared to when there was only one gender matching antecedent. Such effects could indicate that when there are multiple gender matching antecedents in the discourse, both syntactically licit and illicit antecedents compete for retrieval. The clearest evidence of this type of interference in the current study would have been from longer reading times in Experiment 4 in multiple gender match condition (8a) compared to the single match condition (8b). However, we also failed to observe this type of effect. The clearest evidence of the gender of the QP significantly affecting reading times that we did observe was in the opposite direction predicted by facilitatory interference, and was also dissimilar to the effects observed by Badecker and Straub (2002). In the regression path times for the final region in Experiment 4, reading times were significantly longer when the syntactically illicit QP matched the gender of the pronoun, but only when the grammatically licit DP antecedent itself mismatched in gender with the pronoun. Note also that this effect of the QP's gender appears delayed in comparison to the significant main effects of the stereotypical gender of the syntactically licit DP. In line with recent proposals that not all cues to memory retrieval are equally weighted during language processing (Van Dyke and McElree, 2011; Dillon et al., 2013), we argue that the c-command constraint on variable binding, implemented with the Saracatinib supplier ACCESSIBLE feature, is a more highly weighted cue to antecedent retrieval than gender congruence during anaphora resolution. Whether or not the c-command restriction acts as a ��hard constraint�� that imposes a categorical ban on the retrieval of syntactically illicit antecedents is difficult to conclude. However, the relative time-course of effects observed for DP and QP antecedents in Experiment 4 may bear on this issue.