School of Psychological Sciences and Health, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 Jul;39(4):1012-21. doi: 10.1037/a0031215. Epub 2013 Jan 28.
English speakers tend to produce fewer pronouns when a referential competitor has the same gender as the referent than otherwise. Traditionally, this gender congruence effect has been explained in terms of ambiguity avoidance (e.g., Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000; Fukumura, Van Gompel, & Pickering, 2010). However, an alternative hypothesis is that the competitor's gender congruence affects semantic competition, making the referent less accessible relative to when the competitor has a different gender (Arnold & Griffin, 2007). Experiment 1 found that even in Finnish, which is a nongendered language, the competitor's gender congruence results in fewer pronouns, supporting the semantic competition account. In Experiment 2, Finnish native speakers took part in an English version of the same experiment. The effect of gender congruence was larger in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1, suggesting that the presence of a same-gender competitor resulted in a larger reduction in pronoun use in English than in Finnish. In contrast, other nonlinguistic similarity had similar effects in both experiments. This indicates that the effect of gender congruence in English is not entirely driven by semantic competition: Speakers also avoid gender-ambiguous pronouns.
说英语的人在指代对象与参照竞争项具有相同性别时，往往会比在其他情况下使用更少的代词。传统上，这种性别一致性效应是根据避免歧义（例如，Arnold、Eisenband、Brown-Schmidt 和 Trueswell，2000；Fukumura、Van Gompel 和 Pickering，2010）来解释的。然而，另一种假设是，竞争项的性别一致性会影响语义竞争，使得参照对象相对于竞争项具有不同性别时更难被理解（Arnold 和 Griffin，2007）。实验 1 发现，即使在芬兰语这种非性别语言中，竞争项的性别一致性也会导致使用更少的代词，支持语义竞争假设。在实验 2 中，芬兰语母语者参与了相同实验的英语版本。在实验 2 中，性别一致性的影响比实验 1 更大，这表明在英语中，相同性别的竞争项会导致代词使用的减少幅度大于在芬兰语中。相比之下，其他非语言相似性在两个实验中都有类似的影响。这表明英语中性别一致性的影响并非完全由语义竞争驱动：说话者也会避免使用性别模糊的代词。
