Kandel Margaret, Pañeda Claudia, Bahmanian Nasimeh, Martinez Bruera Mercedes, Phillips Colin, Lago Sol
Harvard University, Cambridge, US.
University of Oviedo, ES.
J Cogn. 2025 Jan 7;8(1):10. doi: 10.5334/joc.416. eCollection 2025.
When a speaker produces a pronoun, they must choose a form that carries the appropriate features. The current study investigates how speakers identify these features. We consider two possible routes: a conceptual-lexical route, whereby pronouns derive their features from the concept of the referent, and a syntactic route, whereby pronoun form is determined through a feature matching operation with the linguistic antecedent. We hypothesize that the use of these two routes should be differentially susceptible to interference from representations other than the pronoun's referent. We use agreement attraction to distinguish them. In two experiments, we test whether Spanish speakers produce number and grammatical gender attraction errors. We observe small but reliable attraction effects for both features, demonstrating that pronoun formulation can be disrupted by the linguistic representations of nearby nouns. These attraction effects suggest that speakers can use a syntactic route to pronoun form.
当说话者使用代词时，他们必须选择具有适当特征的形式。本研究调查说话者如何识别这些特征。我们考虑两种可能的途径：一种是概念-词汇途径，即代词从所指对象的概念中获取其特征；另一种是句法途径，即代词形式通过与语言先行词的特征匹配操作来确定。我们假设，这两种途径的使用应该对代词所指对象之外的表征干扰有不同的敏感性。我们使用一致性吸引来区分它们。在两个实验中，我们测试西班牙语使用者是否会产生数和语法性别的吸引错误。我们观察到这两种特征都有小但可靠的吸引效应，表明代词的形成会受到附近名词的语言表征的干扰。这些吸引效应表明说话者可以使用句法途径来确定代词形式。
