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Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English

Research has shown that speakers use fewer pronouns when the referential candidates are more similar and hence compete more strongly. Here we examined the locus of such an effect, investigating (1) whether pronoun use is affected by the referents’ competition at a non-linguistic level only (non-ling...

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Autores principales: Fukumura, Kumiko, Hervé, Coralie, Villata, Sandra, Zhang, Shi, Foppolo, Francesca
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9245162/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34609230
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211051989
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author Fukumura, Kumiko
Hervé, Coralie
Villata, Sandra
Zhang, Shi
Foppolo, Francesca
author_facet Fukumura, Kumiko
Hervé, Coralie
Villata, Sandra
Zhang, Shi
Foppolo, Francesca
author_sort Fukumura, Kumiko
collection PubMed
description Research has shown that speakers use fewer pronouns when the referential candidates are more similar and hence compete more strongly. Here we examined the locus of such an effect, investigating (1) whether pronoun use is affected by the referents’ competition at a non-linguistic level only (non-linguistic competition account) or whether it is also affected by competition arising from the antecedents’ similarities (linguistic competition account) and (2) the extent to which this depends on the type of pronoun. Speakers used Italian null pronouns and English pronouns less often (relative to full nouns) when the referential candidates compete more strongly situationally, while the antecedents’ semantic, grammatical or phonological similarity did not affect the rates of either pronouns, providing support for the non-linguistic competition account. However, unlike English pronouns, Italian null pronouns were unaffected by gender congruence between human referents, running counter to the gender effect for the use of non-gendered overt pronouns reported earlier. Hence, while both null and overt pronouns are sensitive to non-linguistic competition, what similarity affects non-linguistic competition partly depends on the type of pronouns.
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spelling pubmed-92451622022-07-01 Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English Fukumura, Kumiko Hervé, Coralie Villata, Sandra Zhang, Shi Foppolo, Francesca Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) Original Articles Research has shown that speakers use fewer pronouns when the referential candidates are more similar and hence compete more strongly. Here we examined the locus of such an effect, investigating (1) whether pronoun use is affected by the referents’ competition at a non-linguistic level only (non-linguistic competition account) or whether it is also affected by competition arising from the antecedents’ similarities (linguistic competition account) and (2) the extent to which this depends on the type of pronoun. Speakers used Italian null pronouns and English pronouns less often (relative to full nouns) when the referential candidates compete more strongly situationally, while the antecedents’ semantic, grammatical or phonological similarity did not affect the rates of either pronouns, providing support for the non-linguistic competition account. However, unlike English pronouns, Italian null pronouns were unaffected by gender congruence between human referents, running counter to the gender effect for the use of non-gendered overt pronouns reported earlier. Hence, while both null and overt pronouns are sensitive to non-linguistic competition, what similarity affects non-linguistic competition partly depends on the type of pronouns. SAGE Publications 2021-10-22 2022-08 /pmc/articles/PMC9245162/ /pubmed/34609230 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211051989 Text en © Experimental Psychology Society 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Articles
Fukumura, Kumiko
Hervé, Coralie
Villata, Sandra
Zhang, Shi
Foppolo, Francesca
Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English
title Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English
title_full Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English
title_fullStr Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English
title_full_unstemmed Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English
title_short Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English
title_sort representations underlying pronoun choice in italian and english
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9245162/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34609230
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211051989
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AT foppolofrancesca representationsunderlyingpronounchoiceinitalianandenglish