Avoiding gender ambiguous pronouns in French
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Kumiko Fukumura; Celine Pozniak; F.-Xavier Alario
- Source
- Cognition
Cognition, Elsevier, 2021, ⟨10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104909⟩
Cognition, Elsevier, 2021
Cognition, 2022, 218 (104909), ⟨10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104909⟩
- Subject
- Male
semantic similarity
Linguistics and Language
Cognitive Neuroscience
media_common.quotation_subject
[SHS.PSY]Humanities and Social Sciences/Psychology
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Context (language use)
050105 experimental psychology
Language and Linguistics
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Semantic similarity
Congruence (geometry)
Similarity (psychology)
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
[SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics
Language
media_common
ambiguity avoidance
Pronoun
Grammatical gender
referential communication
Language production
05 social sciences
[SDV.NEU.SC]Life Sciences [q-bio]/Neurons and Cognition [q-bio.NC]/Cognitive Sciences
Linguistics
Ambiguity
Semantics
grammatical gender
Female
pronoun
Psychology
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
language production
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 0010-0277
1873-7838
International audience; Across many languages, pronouns are the most frequently produced referring expressions. We examined whether and how speakers avoid referential ambiguity that arises when the gender of a pronoun is compatible with more than one entity in the context in French. Experiment 1 showed that speakers use fewer pronouns when human referents have the same gender than when they had different genders, but grammatical gender congruence between inanimate referents did not result in fewer pronouns. Experiment 2 showed that semantic similarity between non-human referents can enhance the likelihood that speakers avoid grammatical-gender ambiguous pronouns. Experiment 3 pitched grammatical gender ambiguity avoidance against the referents' competition in the non-linguistic context, showing that when speakers can base their pronoun choice on non-linguistic competition, they ignore the pronoun's grammatical gender ambiguity even when the referents are semantically related. The results thus indicated that speakers preferentially produce referring expressions based on non-linguistic information; they are more likely to be affected by the referents' non-linguistic similarity than by the linguistic ambiguity of a pronoun.