The Production of Subject Anaphoric Expressions in Italian and Mexican Spanish: A Forced-Choice Experimental Study

• Published in: Journal of psycholinguistic research Vol. 52; no. 6; pp. 2257 - 2285
• Main Authors: Contemori, Carla, Di Domenico, Elisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.12.2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Anaphora; Antecedents; Attention; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Bias; Clauses; Cognitive Psychology; Comparative linguistics; Gender; Grammar; Grammatical subject; Humans; Italian language; Italy; Language; Noun phrases; Nouns; Periodicals; Preferences; Pronouns; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Reference Materials; Romance Languages; Semantics; Sentence completion tests; Sentences; Short Term Memory; Spanish language; Italy; Italian; Spanish; Anaphoric expressions; Null subject languages; Elicited production
• ISSN: 0090-6905; 1573-6555; 1573-6555
• DOI: 10.1007/s10936-023-09993-w

We compare the production of anaphoric expressions in Spanish and Italian. In two sentence completion tasks, Spanish and Italian-speaking participants complete sentence fragments where we manipulate the location of the antecedents (in a main or subordinate clause), the gender of the antecedents (similar or different) and the referent of the anaphoric expression (subject or object antecedent). Our results show a weaker subject bias for null pronouns and a weaker object bias for overt pronouns in Spanish compared to Italian. In addition, a thetic interpretation of the initial (subordinate) clause decreases the accessibility of the subject antecedent, leading to an increased use of noun phrases when there is gender-similarity between antecedents. By including gender dissimilar antecedents, we further observe an increase in speakers’ production of overt pronouns when reference to an object antecedent is expected.