Avoiding gender ambiguous pronouns in French.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Pronouns are frequent referring expressions across languages.
• Referential ambiguity arises when a pronoun's gender matches multiple entities.
• Understanding ambiguity avoidance strategies is key to language production.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how French speakers manage referential ambiguity with gender-ambiguous pronouns.
• To determine the influence of referent type (human vs. inanimate) and semantic similarity on pronoun use.
• To compare the impact of linguistic ambiguity versus non-linguistic context on pronoun choice.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted using French speakers.
• Experiment 1: Compared pronoun use with same-gender vs. different-gender human referents and inanimate referents.
• Experiments 2 & 3: Examined the role of semantic similarity and non-linguistic context in ambiguity avoidance.

Main Results:

• Speakers used fewer pronouns when human referents shared the same gender.
• Grammatical gender congruence of inanimate referents did not affect pronoun use.
• Semantic similarity increased avoidance of ambiguous pronouns for non-human referents.
• Non-linguistic context (competition) overrode grammatical gender ambiguity, even with semantic similarity.

Conclusions:

• Speakers prioritize non-linguistic information over linguistic ambiguity in pronoun production.
• Referent type and semantic relatedness influence ambiguity management strategies.
• Non-linguistic context plays a dominant role in resolving referential ambiguity, overriding grammatical gender cues.