This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, "TA," in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

When making requests, speakers need to select from a range of alternative forms available to them. In a corpus of naturally occurring Italian interaction, the two most common formats chosen are imperatives and interrogative constructions that include a turn-initial dative pronoun "mi" "to/for me", which is referred to as the "Mi X"? format in this…