Number Attraction in Pronoun Production

Abstract

Pronoun production involves at least two processes: (i) deciding to refer to a referent with a pronoun instead of a full NP and (ii) determining the pronoun’s form. In the present study, we assess whether the second of these processes occurs as a by-product of the first process—namely, does accessing the message-level representation of the referent provide access to the features required to determine pronoun form, meaning that pronouns should be robust to errors, or are pronoun features determined through an agreement operation with the antecedent, in which case they may be susceptible to agreement attraction, similar to subject–verb agreement. Prior lab experiments suggest that pronouns display number attraction at a similar rate to verbs. However, in contrast to verb attraction errors, there is no documentation of systematic pronoun attraction errors in corpora of natural speech. Our study builds upon prior lab work by eliciting pronoun sentences using a scene description paradigm that engages the pronominalization processes involved in natural speech. Across three experiments, we observed small but reliable number attraction effects for pronouns, suggesting that pronoun form is not always determined from the message-level representation of the referent. The elicited error rates were smaller than those previously observed for verbs in a similar scene-description paradigm; this smaller error rate helps to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between pronoun number attraction error rates observed in and outside the lab. The results suggest that pronoun form is determined (at least at times) through an agreement process referencing the features of the linguistic antecedent.