Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined how speakers avoid gender ambiguous pronouns, exploiting cross-linguistic variations in French, Italian,and English. The gender congruence between two human referents led to fewer pronouns (more nouns) in both Frenchand English, whereas the grammatical gender congruence between two inanimate referents had no effect on the use ofpronouns in English, where grammatical gender is absent, as well as French, where grammatical gender is present. InItalian, gender congruence did not affect the use of null pronouns in all conditions, which are ambiguous regardless. Theresults are compatible with the non-linguistic competition account: Speakers avoid gender ambiguous pronouns only whenthe gender congruence increases their non-linguistic similarity.