Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism: Online-First Articles

Pronoun interpretation in Italian

Exploring the effects of prosody

ORCID logo | McGill University
ORCID logo | McGill University
ORCID logo | Université Laval
ORCID logo | Université Laval
ORCID logo | York University
| Beijing Foreign Studies University
We explore potential effects of prosody on pronoun interpretation in Italian, building on previous research which has shown that second language learners/users (L2ers) assign non-target interpretations to overt pronouns. We investigate effects of contrastive stress and pause, proposing that these will result in changes to default antecedent preferences for overt and null pronouns, for L2ers and for native speakers. An experiment was conducted, involving English-speaking L2ers of Italian and Italian native speakers. Participants were presented with auditory stimuli like Lorenzo ha scritto a Roberto quando Ø/lui si è trasferito a Torino ‘Lorenzo wrote to Roberto when (he) moved to Turin’ and indicated their preferred antecedent for the pronoun. Overt versus null pronouns, presence versus absence of stress on overt pronouns, and presence versus absence of pause between clauses were manipulated. The results yielded significant differences for antecedent choices between null and overt pronouns, consistent with earlier literature. In addition, stress was significant for both groups. Implications of a prosodic approach to ambiguity resolution are discussed.
Keywords: prosody, stress, pronoun, Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Previous findings on anaphora resolution
    • 1.2Prosodic effects on pronoun interpretation
  • 2.Experiment
    • 2.1Predictions
    • 2.2Sentence types
    • 2.3Participants
    • 2.4Procedure
    • 2.5Results and analysis
  • 3.Discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Competing interests declaration
  • Data availability statement
  • References
Published online: 8 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22013.whi
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