| Summary: | 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.
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