Avoiding gender ambiguous pronouns in French.

Across many languages, pronouns are the most frequently produced referring expressions. We examined whether and how speakers avoid referential ambiguity that arises when the gender of a pronoun is compatible with more than one entity in the context in French. Experiment 1 showed that speakers use fewer pronouns when human referents have the same gender than when they had different genders, but grammatical gender congruence between inanimate referents did not result in fewer pronouns. Experiment 2 showed that semantic similarity between non-human referents can enhance the likelihood that speakers avoid grammatical-gender ambiguous pronouns. Experiment 3 pitched grammatical gender ambiguity avoidance against the referents' competition in the non-linguistic context, showing that when speakers can base their pronoun choice on non-linguistic competition, they ignore the pronoun's grammatical gender ambiguity even when the referents are semantically related. The results thus indicated that speakers preferentially produce referring expressions based on non-linguistic information; they are more likely to be affected by the referents' non-linguistic similarity than by the linguistic ambiguity of a pronoun.

Political dimensions of gender inclusive writing in Parisian universities.

Écriture inclusive (EI) has long been the topic of public debates in France. These debates have become more intense in recent years, often focusing on the higher education system and culminating in the formulation of three separate laws banning it for public administration. In this paper, we investigate the foundations of these conflicts through a large quantitative corpus study of the (non)use of EI in Parisian undergraduate brochures. Our results suggest that Parisian university professors use EI not only to ensure gender neutral reference but also as a tool to construct their political identities. We show that both the use of EI and its particular forms are conditioned by how brochure writers position themselves on non gender-related-related issues within the French university's political landscape, which explains how conflicts surrounding a linguistic practice have become understood as conflicts about larger issues in French society. Our paper thus provides new information to be taken into account in the formulation and promotion of nonsexist language policies and sheds light on how feminist linguistic activism and its opposition are deeply intertwined with other kinds of social activism in present-day France.

L'écriture inclusive (EI) fait depuis longtemps l'objet de débats publics en France. Ces débats, devenus plus intenses ces dernières années, se sont souvent concentrés autour de l'éducation supérieure et ont mené à la formulation de trois lois proscrivant l'EI pour les administrations. Dans cet article, nous analysons les raisons de ces conflits en présentant une étude de corpus quantitative sur l'utilisation ou la non­utilisation de l'EI dans les brochures de licence des universités parisiennes. Nos résultats montrent que les enseignants et enseignantes des universités parisiennes utilisent l'EI non seulement pour marquer une référence générale (neutre au niveau du genre), mais aussi pour construire leur identité politique. À travers cette étude, nous montrons que l'utilisation de l'EI et de ses formes est déterminée par le positionnement des personnes écrivant les brochures sur les problématiques non liées au genre dans le paysage politique des universités parisiennes. Notre article donne ainsi de nouvelles informations dont il faut tenir compte pour la formulation et la promotion des politiques linguistiques non sexistes, et met en lumière comment le militantisme linguistique féministe est profondément lié à d'autres formes de militantisme social dans la France actuelle.

Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous.

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.

Corrigendum: Cross-Domain Priming From Mathematics to Relative-Clause Attachment: A Visual-World Study in French.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02056.].

Cross-Domain Priming From Mathematics to Relative-Clause Attachment: A Visual-World Study in French.

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the linguistic domain. But does priming also work across different domains? In line with previous experiments, we investigated cross-domain structural priming from mathematical expressions to linguistic structures with respect to relative clause attachment in French (e.g., la fille du professeur qui habitait à Paris/the daughter of the teacher who lived in Paris). Testing priming in French is particularly interesting because it will extend earlier results established for English to a language where the baseline for relative clause attachment preferences is different form English: in English, relative clauses (RCs) tend to be attached to the local noun phrase (low attachment) while in French there is a preference for high attachment of relative clauses to the first noun phrase (NP). Moreover, in contrast to earlier studies, we applied an online-technique (visual world eye-tracking). Our results confirm cross-domain priming from mathematics to linguistic structures in French. Most interestingly, different from less mathematically adept participants, we found that in mathematically skilled participants, the effect emerged very early on (at the beginning of the relative clause in the speech stream) and is also present later (at the end of the relative clause). In line with previous findings, our experiment suggests that mathematics and language share aspects of syntactic structure at a very high-level of abstraction.