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

Abstract

The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical, and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns (in Experiment 1) and relative pronouns (in Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: language production; pronouns; grammatical agreement.Pronouns can be found in all languages of the world. In English and Dutch they are among the most commonly used words in print (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993) and are probably even more frequent in speech. They are fundamental to both the structure and the function of language. They are nonetheless far from simple in their conditions of use, either linguistically or cognitively, in either comprehension or production. One testimonial to their cognitive complexity comes from language acquisition, where children's problems with pronouns may persist well past the point at which the use of common nouns is firmly established (Clark, 1978;Clark & Sengul, 1978).For adult listeners, the challenges of interpreting pronouns have to do with identifying pronominal referents and antecedents from the minimal feature specifications that pronouns afford. In English, these features include little beyond number, natural gender, and animacy. Some languages add more features to the set, notably grammatical gender, but because the sparse meaning specifications of pronouns are Order of authorship is arbitrary. The research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR 94-11627), the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011), and visiting research fellowships from the Max Planck Society. We thank Femke van der Meulen and Marianne Wissink for their assistance in preparing the materials and carrying out the experiments, Don...

When Sex and Syntax Go Hand in Hand: Gender Agreement in Language Production

“…It would be difficult for such a position to explain why nouns with grammatical and conceptual gender induce different numbers of agreement errors. A distinction between conceptual and grammatical gender is also supported in other investigations concerning subject-pronoun agreement (see Cacciari, Carreiras, &BarboliniCionini, 1997, for comprehension andMeyer &Bock, 1998, for production).…”

The production of pronominal clitics: Implications for theories of lexical access

“…In other words, pronoun production requires the selection of the lexical representation where the head noun's grammatical properties are specified, but not the selection of the phonological content of the noun. This property of gender-marked pronouns provides the basis for addressing questions about lexical access at the level where a word's grammatical features are represented independently of the processes implicated in the selection of the word's phonological content (see, e.g., Jescheniak, Schriefers, & Hantsch, 2001;Meyer & Bock, 1999). Here we consider two issues: the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of grammatical feature selection.…”

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.…”