Differences between grammatical gender and semantic gender in pronominal antecedent retrieval in brazilian portuguese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.5056Keywords:
Coreference processing, Gender cues, Memory retrieval, Brazilian PortugueseAbstract
Coreference is a syntactic dependency in which pronouns are bound to previous referents. The aim of this research is to provide more information on how pronominal antecedents are retrieved from memory, and, more precisely, to clarify the role of gender cues in pronominal antecedent retrieval in Brazilian Portuguese, granted that its speakers are used to rely on agreement cues during its processing once it has visible morphology. The results of two eye-tracking experiments conducted with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese demonstrated that both binding structural constraints and gender morphological cues are equally important in antecedent retrieval in memory at early stages of coreference processing. This is evidence that binding structural constraints do not work as an initial filter, blocking the influence of structurally unacceptable antecedent candidates. In addition, the results indicated that semantic gender and masculine gender seemed to weigh more in memory than grammatical gender and feminine gender since structurally unacceptable candidates carrying the former types of gender caused more interference effects.
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