Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features
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,...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Ubiquity Press
2025
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| _version_ | 1824458924576735232 |
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| author | Kandel, M Pañeda, C Bahmanian, N Martinez Bruera, M Phillips, C Lago, S |
| author_facet | Kandel, M Pañeda, C Bahmanian, N Martinez Bruera, M Phillips, C Lago, S |
| author_sort | Kandel, M |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-09T03:24:19Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:b9badcf4-2a17-4538-ac11-cec9fc9a741d |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2025-02-19T04:33:37Z |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| publisher | Ubiquity Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:b9badcf4-2a17-4538-ac11-cec9fc9a741d2025-01-14T07:41:28ZNumber and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their featuresJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:b9badcf4-2a17-4538-ac11-cec9fc9a741dEnglishSymplectic ElementsUbiquity Press2025Kandel, MPañeda, CBahmanian, NMartinez Bruera, MPhillips, CLago, SWhen 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. |
| spellingShingle | Kandel, M Pañeda, C Bahmanian, N Martinez Bruera, M Phillips, C Lago, S Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
| title | Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
| title_full | Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
| title_fullStr | Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
| title_full_unstemmed | Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
| title_short | Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
| title_sort | number and grammatical gender attraction in spanish pronouns evidence for a syntactic route to their features |
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