In formulating a referring expression, speakers may choose between an explicit expression (such as a proper name or a noun phrase) or a reduced form such as a pronoun. We investigated whether speakers are influenced by their conversation partners to produce full noun phrases instead of pronouns and whether this differs depending on whether their…

Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., "Studenten"masc.'students') can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

One pronoun production experiment and one pronoun comprehension experiment were performed to investigate the role of grammatical number information in long-distance anaphora, with referent and pronoun either in adjacent sentences or separated by an intervening sentence. The experiments tested the assumption that the influence of grammatical number…