Language
Does grammar steer who 'him' refers to from the very start?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When reading a pronoun like 'him', people consider only the names that grammar allows as its referent from the earliest moment, rather than first grabbing any name of the right gender and filtering later.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Five within-participant reading experiments (four word-by-word self-paced reading, one eye-tracking) crossing the gender match of grammatically allowed and disallowed antecedents with a pronoun; Experiment 2 is a direct replication attempt
- N
- Separate samples of University of Maryland students per experiment: 36 (Exp 1), 26 (Exp 2), 26 (Exp 3), 38 (Exp 4), 24 (Exp 5, eye-tracking); plus 20 online raters who normed noun gender bias
- Population
- Native English-speaking university students, mostly aged 18-28
- Outcome
- Reading times at and just after the pronoun (self-paced reading) and first-pass, regression-path and total reading times (eye-tracking)
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Key findings
Readers slowed down right after the pronoun whenever the grammatically allowed name mismatched in gender, a robust 'grammaticality effect' in Experiments 1 and 2. Critically, a gender-matching but grammatically forbidden name never made this slowdown smaller, which is what an agreement-first account predicts. The previously reported cost of having two matching names was never replicated in any of the five experiments, even though each had more data than the original, and a late slowdown from a forbidden matching name appeared only in a couple of conditions, after the early grammar effect.
Methodology
Across five experiments, university students read sentences such as 'John thought that Bill liked him', where grammar (Binding Principle B) allows only the main-clause name to be the referent of 'him'. The researchers varied whether the allowed name and the forbidden, nearer name matched the pronoun's gender, and measured reading slowdowns just after the pronoun. Experiment 1 also varied how similar and how distant the names were, Experiment 2 exactly reproduced an earlier study's materials and procedure, and Experiments 3-5 (including one with eye-tracking) looked for costs when two names matched.
Limitations
The conclusions rest partly on null results (no facilitative interference), so a very small interference effect could still exist; the authors argue against this by comparison with verb agreement but did not formally test power. Only the masculine pronoun 'him' and English sentences with names or gender-stereotyped nouns were tested, so the findings may not extend to other pronouns, languages or discourse-level reference. Reading times are indirect measures of memory retrieval, and some reported effects were significant only by participants or only by items.
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