Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 69, Issue 3, 1 January 1999, Pages 313-335
Cognition

Lexical access in the production of pronouns

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00073-0Get rights and content

Abstract

Speakers can use pronouns when their conceptual referents are accessible from the preceding discourse, as in `The flower is red. It turns blue'. Theories of language production agree that in order to produce a noun semantic, syntactic, and phonological information must be accessed. However, little is known about lexical access to pronouns. In this paper, we propose a model of pronoun access in German. Since the forms of German pronouns depend on the grammatical gender of the nouns they replace, the model claims that speakers must access the syntactic representation of the replaced noun (its lemma) to select a pronoun. In two experiments using the lexical decision during naming paradigm [Levelt, W.J.M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A.S., Pechmann, T., Havinga, J., 1991a. The time course of lexical access in speech production: a study of picture naming. Psychological Review 98, 122–142], we investigated whether lemma access automatically entails the activation of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is only activated when the noun itself is produced, but not when it is replaced by a pronoun. Experiment 1 showed that during pronoun production the phonological form of the replaced noun is activated. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this phonological activation was not a residual of the use of the noun in the preceding sentence. Thus, when a pronoun is produced, the lemma and the phonological form of the replaced noun become reactivated.

Introduction

Speaking, most of the time, means transforming an idea or a message into a structured pattern of sounds. The speaker's goal is to produce words so that a listener can understand the message. In many theories, the transfer from ideas to words involves three main steps: message encoding, grammatical encoding, and phonological encoding (Garrett, 1975, Garrett, 1980, Garrett, 1988; Stemberger, 1985; Dell, 1986; Levelt, 1989, Levelt, 1992; Dell and O'Seaghdha, 1991, Dell and O'Seaghdha, 1992; Bock and Levelt, 1994; Bock, 1995; Levelt et al., in press). During message encoding the intended meaning of the utterance is specified prelinguistically. The message serves as input to the grammatical level of processing. During grammatical encoding, words are retrieved from the mental lexicon via a process called lexical access. As a result of lexical access, the syntactic properties of words, i.e. their lemmas, become available. The selected elements are combined into a syntactic structure. This structure is the input to the stage of phonological encoding, during which the phonological (segmental, prosodic) and phonetic shape of the utterance are generated. After the phonetic form has been computed, articulation can take place. Empirical evidence consistent with the existence of several levels of speech planning comes from speech-error data (Garrett, 1975, Garrett, 1980, Garrett, 1988; Dell, 1986; Martin et al., 1996), picture-naming studies (for a review see Schriefers et al., 1990; Glaser, 1992; Levelt et al., 1991a, Levelt et al., 1991bLevelt et al., in press; Peterson and Savoy, 1998), and electrophysiological data (Van Turennout et al., 1997, Van Turennout et al., 1998). Critical discussions of the notion of a separate syntactic (lemma) level are offered by Caramazza (1997)and Starreveld and La Heij, 1995, Starreveld and La Heij, 1996.

Most experiments on lexical access have studied the access to single nouns (e.g. Schriefers et al., 1990; Levelt et al., 1991a, Levelt et al., 1991b; Roelofs, 1992a, Roelofs, 1992b; Starreveld and La Heij, 1995, Starreveld and La Heij, 1996; O'Seaghdha and Marin, 1997; Peterson and Savoy, 1998). A few have investigated slightly more complex utterances, such as adjective noun phrases (Schriefers, 1993) and noun phrase coordinations (Meyer, 1996, Meyer, 1997; Meyer et al., 1998). In the present study, we addressed the generation of pronouns in utterances such as `The flower is red. It turns blue'. The participants in our experiments generated such sentence pairs during a picture description task. As will be explained below, our main goal was to determine whether the phonological form of the antecedent noun is activated when it is replaced by a pronoun. We will, however, first propose a working model of lexical access to pronouns.

Section snippets

Four steps from intention to pronoun access

We propose that lexical access to a pronoun involves the following four steps.

Is the antecedent phonologically activated during pronoun generation?

The aim of the experiments reported below was to investigate the phonological activation of a noun antecedent during the generation of the corresponding pronoun. In one condition, speakers produced utterance pairs such as `Die Blume ist rot. Sie wird blau.' (The flower is red. It turns blue.) In another condition, they produced pairs such as `Die Sonne ist rot. Die Blume ist blau.' (The sun is red. The flower is blue.) In order to produce the noun `Blume', its phonological representation must

The experimental paradigm

To test whether the phonological form of the antecedent noun is activated during the production of a pronoun, we used a novel version of the lexical decision during naming paradigm introduced by Levelt et al. (1991a), which is based on Stroop-like interference effects (Stroop, 1935; for a review see MacLeod, 1991). In the experiment carried out by Levelt et al., the participants' default task was to name pictures of objects. However, on some trials the naming process was disturbed by the

Participants

Thirty-two participants, aged 17–38 years, were recruited through a newspaper advertisement. They were native speakers of German. The data from three participants were excluded from further analyses because they made errors on more than 20% of the trials.

Materials

A set of unambiguous pictures was selected, such that most of the participants labeled them in the same way in the naming task. This ensured that the participants would retrieve the intended lexical item for a particular picture. In addition,

Participants

Thirty-five participants were recruited through a newspaper advertisement, and paid for participation. Their age ranged from 18 to 36 years. The data from five participants were excluded from further analysis, because they made errors on more than 20% of the trials.

Material, design, apparatus, and procedure

The same materials were used as in Experiment 1, except that in the noun condition the order of the two pictures shown on successive trials was reversed (see Appendix C). Design, apparatus, and procedure were the same as in

Conclusion

According to our working model, pronouns are used when lexical concepts are marked as `in focus' in the discourse record. Since in German, and many other languages, pronouns agree in grammatical gender with the antecedent nouns, we assume that the choice of the correct pronoun requires the corresponding lemma and the attached gender node to be selected. On the assumption that a phonological form cannot become activated in the absence of activation of the corresponding lemma, the obtained

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper was part of a PhD project of B. Schmitt, supported by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, München, Germany. We would especially like to thank Herbert Baumann, Inge Doehring, Gerd Klaas, John Nagengast, and Ad Verbunt for technical assistance; Jens Bölte and Pienie Zwitserlood, Department of Psychology, University of Münster, Germany, who helped us very much to carry out the experiments in German by offering one of their laboratories;

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