When Words Have Two Genders: Anaphor Resolution for Italian Functionally Ambiguous Words

Cacciari, Cristina; Carreiras, Manuel; Cionini, Cristina Barbolini

doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2528

Cited by 67 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(11 reference statements)

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“…In keeping with previous work on pronoun comprehension (Cacciari et al, 1997;Garnham et al, 1995) we found that speakers do not select pronouns on the basis of referential or conceptual information alone. Of course, being speakers, they must use referential and conceptual information from the outset of the formulation process.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 89%

“…However, the effect of grammatical gender diminished rapidly: When a clause separated the pronoun from its antecedent, pronouns with human (i.e., biologically gendered) antecedents were understood more readily than pronouns with inanimate (i.e., only grammatically gendered) antecedents. Cacciari et al (1997) found similar tendencies in Italian: Pronouns whose antecedents bore overt grammatical gender were understood more readily than pronouns without an explicitly gendered antecedent.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

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Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Meyer

Bock

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

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The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical, and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns (in Experiment 1) and relative pronouns (in Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: language production; pronouns; grammatical agreement.Pronouns can be found in all languages of the world. In English and Dutch they are among the most commonly used words in print (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993) and are probably even more frequent in speech. They are fundamental to both the structure and the function of language. They are nonetheless far from simple in their conditions of use, either linguistically or cognitively, in either comprehension or production. One testimonial to their cognitive complexity comes from language acquisition, where children's problems with pronouns may persist well past the point at which the use of common nouns is firmly established (Clark, 1978;Clark & Sengul, 1978).For adult listeners, the challenges of interpreting pronouns have to do with identifying pronominal referents and antecedents from the minimal feature specifications that pronouns afford. In English, these features include little beyond number, natural gender, and animacy. Some languages add more features to the set, notably grammatical gender, but because the sparse meaning specifications of pronouns are Order of authorship is arbitrary. The research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR 94-11627), the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011), and visiting research fellowships from the Max Planck Society. We thank Femke van der Meulen and Marianne Wissink for their assistance in preparing the materials and carrying out the experiments, Don...

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Meyer

Bock

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that the processing of pronouns is sensitive to the syntactic gender of their antecedent in Romance languages (e.g. Cacciari, Carreiras, & Barbolini Cionini, 1997;Garnham, Oakhill, Ehrlich, & Carreiras, 1995), suggesting that readers reaccess the gender of a pronoun's antecedent as they do during lexical access.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Antecedent frequency effects during the processing of pronouns

Gompel

Majid

2004

Cognition

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An eye-movement reading experiment investigated whether the ease with which pronouns are processed is affected by the lexical frequency of their antecedent. Reading times following pronouns with infrequent antecedents were faster than following pronouns with frequent antecedents. We argue that this is consistent with a saliency account, according to which infrequent antecedents are more salient than frequent antecedents. The results are not predicted by accounts which claim that readers access all or part of the lexical properties of the antecedent during the processing of pronouns. q

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“…Lexical decisions for nouns are speeded by the prior occurrence of an article or adjective that agrees with it in gender (Gurjanov, 1985;Lukatela et al, 1987;Jakubowicz and Faussart, 1998). The presence of gender-marked words in the preceding context can reduce the time it takes to say a word (e.g., for nouns in Italian, see Bates et al, 1996; for verbs in Hebrew, see Deutsch et al, 1999), name a picture (Jacobsen, 1999;Bentrovato et al, 1999), read a text (Cacciari et al, 1997;Deutsch and Bentin, 2001;Deutsch et al, 1999) or identify the object of an utterance among words sharing an initial phoneme (e.g., based on gender agreement in French, the article le can be followed by bouton but not by bouteille, Dahan et al, 2000). Gender information can also contribute to anaphor resolution within a sentence by aiding in determining co-reference relations between a noun and pronoun, or for a single pronoun that may have multiple antecedents of different genders (e.g., Carreiras et al, 1993;Garnham et al, 1995).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expecting Gender: An Event Related Brain Potential Study on the Role of Grammatical Gender in Comprehending a Line Drawing Within a Written Sentence in Spanish

Wicha¹,

Moreno²,

Kutas

2003

Cortex

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Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in written sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers read sentences in which a drawing depicting a target noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and either agreed or disagreed in gender with that of the preceding article. The gender-agreement violation at the drawing was associated with an enhanced negativity between 500 and 700 msec post-stimulus onset. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited a larger N400 than congruent drawings regardless of gender (dis)agreement, indicating little effect of grammatical gender agreement on contextual integration of a picture into a written sentence context. We also observed an enhanced negativity for articles with unexpected relative to expected gender based on prior sentence context indicating that readers generate expectations for specific nouns and their articles.

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When Words Have Two Genders: Anaphor Resolution for Italian Functionally Ambiguous Words

Cited by 67 publications

References 35 publications

Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Antecedent frequency effects during the processing of pronouns

Expecting Gender: An Event Related Brain Potential Study on the Role of Grammatical Gender in Comprehending a Line Drawing Within a Written Sentence in Spanish

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