Hearing Pronouns Primes Speakers to Use Pronouns.

Abstract

Speaking requires frequent decisions about how to refer, for example whether to use a pronoun (she) or a name (Ana). It is well known that this choice is guided by the discourse context, but little is known about the representations that are activated. We use priming to test whether this choice can be facilitated through recent exposure, and if so, what representations are activated. In a storytelling task, participants take turns with experimenters telling a story that is illustrated in 2-panel cartoons. The first sentence is given, and participants describe the second panel in their own words. We manipulate whether the experimenter used a pronoun or name in the prior story. Experiment 1 provides the first evidence in the literature that reference form choice can be primed, and that it is not dependent on the syntactic position of the antecedent. However, the effect is not finely tuned to the preceding prime. Instead, exposure at the start of the experiment persists throughout, even when the prime changes. Experiments 2 and 3 further show that exposure to pronoun primes result in greater pronoun use than at baseline, but that there is no sensitivity to the prime on the most recent trial. Results argue against a role for production facilitation in pronoun use, which suggests that reference production is not impacted by production efficiency.