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Published on: November 30, 2018
New arguments in favour of an automatic gender pronominal process
François Rigalleau1, David Caplan, Vanessa Baudiffier
1Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, France. frigalleau@compuserve.com
Abstract:
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.
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