Lexical access in the production of pronouns

Abstract

Speakers can use pronouns when their conceptual referents are accessible from the preceding discourse, as in 'The flower is red. It turns blue'. Theories of language production agree that in order to produce a noun semantic, syntactic, and phonological information must be accessed. However, little is known about lexical access to pronouns. In this paper, we propose a model of pronoun access in German. Since the forms of German pronouns depend on the grammatical gender of the nouns they replace, the model claims that speakers must access the syntactic representation of the replaced noun (its lemma) to select a pronoun. In two experiments using the lexical decision during naming paradigm [Levelt, W.J.M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A.S., Pechmann, T., Havinga, J., 1991a. The time course of lexical access in speech production: a study of picture naming. Psychological Review 98, 122-142], we investigated whether lemma access automatically entails the activation of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is only activated when the noun itself is produced, but not when it is replaced by a pronoun. Experiment 1 showed that during pronoun production the phonological form of the replaced noun is activated. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this phonological activation was not a residual of the use of the noun in the preceding sentence. Thus, when a pronoun is produced, the lemma and the phonological form of the replaced noun become reactivated.

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

“…For another, the syntactic planning processes demanded by sentence production appear to require that structurally relevant grammatical information (like gender) be accessible before phonological information is normally accessed in the course of spontaneous speaking. Since the scope of phonological preparation is fairly narrow (Dell & O'Seaghdha, 1992;Meyer, 1996;Schmitt, Meyer, & Levelt, 1999), grammatical information may become active before and remain active after sound specifications are encoded.…”

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

“…Pictures have often been used, both in isolation and in a sentence context, to address questions about lexical access (e.g., Bentrovato et al, 1999;Glaser, 1992;Jacobsen, 1999;Jescheniak, 1999;Levelt, Schriefers, Vorberg, & Meyer, 1991;Levelt et al, 1999;Potter, 1986;Potter & Faulconer, 1975;Schmitt, Meyer, & Levelt, 1999;Schmitt, RodriguezFornells et al, 2001a). However, the extent to which pictures and words share a common representation in the brain is a matter of long-standing debate (see Federmeier & Kutas, 2001 for a comprehensive discussion of electrophysiological and behavioural evidence).…”

Gender Bender: Gender Errors in L2 Pronoun Production

“…This is certainly very likely to be the case for grammatical gender (Meyer and Bock 1999;Schmitt et al 1999), and, in principle, it could also be so even if the pronominal gender feature is based on the natural gender of the referent. Consequently, if the gender feature is being derived from the lemma, pronoun gender errors would not be a reflection of processing at the conceptual level, but rather of grammatical encoding and lexical access.…”

“…Pronouns have been studied with respect to agreement (e.g., Bock et al 1999), to which conditions influence choosing a pronoun over other form of referring expressions (Arnold and Griffin 2007;Sridhar 1988), and, crucially, to whether pronouns are retrieved with respect to their linguistic (discourse) antecedent or to their conceptual referent (Meyer and Bock 1999;Schmitt et al 1999). Both Meyer and Bock (1999), and Schmitt et al (1999) conclude on the basis of their results that pronoun production requires the activation of the antecedent at a syntactic level. This conclusion is at odds with the claim made here that pronoun gender errors are probably the result of speakers failing to include gender information in the PVM and then finding themselves one feature short for correct third person singular pronoun selection.…”

“…Postulating a different mechanism for pronouns referring to animate or inanimate entities would also explain why Meyer and Bock (1999) and Schmitt et al (1999) found evidence of pronouns being processed from their lexical antecedents since they studied pronoun production with respect to inanimate nouns in Dutch and German. Given that, in both German and Dutch, grammatical gender is not reliably predicted by conceptual properties of the referent (for example, plate is neuter in Dutch but masculine in German), it is to be expected that its retrieval would depend on the activation of the grammatical properties of the referent which may only be possible by accessing the antecedent's lemma.…”