New arguments in favour of an automatic gender pronominal process.
This paper examines the automatic and strategic use of gender information in pronominal processing. Experiments 1 and 2 used short sentences where a pronoun was preceded by two potential antecedents. Results showed that even when adult readers did not use pronominal gender to strategically accelerate pronominal resolution, they remained sensitive to a gender disagreement between the pronoun and its potential referents. This gender sensitivity was further explored in Experiments 3 and 4. These experiments used longer texts where only one of the two potential referents was highly accessible when the pronoun was encountered. A gender disagreement between the pronoun and this antecedent induced longer reading times. The four experiments confirm the existence of a nonstrategic gender coindexation process between a pronoun and the entity in the focus of a discourse.
Rigalleau
François
F
Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, France. frigalleau@compuserve.com
Caplan
David
D
Baudiffier
Vanessa
V
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary