Chinese Speakers’ Interpretation Of Ambiguous Pronouns In Complex Sentences Containing Temporal Clauses In L1 Chinese And L2 French

The current study examined Chinese speakers’ interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in complex sentences containing temporal clauses in L1 Chinese and L2 French.Specifically,it aimed to find out the role of subjecthood and topichood in native and nonnative pronoun interpretation.To this end,we conducted two offline experiments on native Chinese speakers(Experiment 1)and intermediate Chinese-speaking French learners(Experiment 2).Experiment 1 was further divided into Experiment 1a and 1b,focusing overt and null pronoun,respectively.Following Colonna et al.(2012),we contrasted three structures in which the antecedents appear: SVO,S(top)VO and O(top)SV,with the subject or the object topicalized via dislocation.All structures were followed by a clause beginning with an ambiguous pronoun.Participants were asked to indicate which referent the pronoun referred to.The results of Experiment 1 show the following patterns.First,subjecthood has influence over the interpretation of Chinese null pronouns rather than overt pronouns.For overt pronouns,most participants chose the object entity in the Baseline SVO conditions as the pronoun’s antecedent.In contrast,there was a significant preference for the subject entity as the antecedent of ambiguous null pronouns.Second,topichood affects both overt pronouns and null pronouns in a similar pattern,leading to more references to the topicalized entity.As the topic of the sentence shifted between the subject and the object,the references of the pronoun to the subject or the object increased correspondingly compared to the Baseline condition.Overall,the results from native Chinese speakers indicate the higher accessibility of null pronouns than overt pronouns and the importance of topichood in Chinese pronoun resolution.Comparing the results of Experiment 2 and native French speakers’ results from Colonna et al.(2012),we found the following differences.First,subjecthood exerts an influence on intermediate L1-Chinese L2-French learners’ interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in complex sentences containing temporal clauses.In the Baseline condition,L2 learners are more likely to choose the logical subject in the main clause as the antecedent of the ambiguous pronoun in the clause,while native French speakers are biased towards the object as the antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun.Second,topichood affects Chinese French learners’ interpretation of pronouns in French complex sentences containing temporal clauses.When the subject antecedent is topicalized,L2 learners show a significant augment in subject references compared with the Baseline condition.Meanwhile,native French speakers still show an object antecedent bias.When the object antecedent is topicalized,L2 learners resolve the ambiguous pronoun in temporal clauses more to the object.By contrast,native French speakers are less likely to interpret the ambiguous pronoun as referring to the object entity even compared with the Baseline condition.We argue that theses difference may be due to native language transfer or the difficulty for L2 learners to represent and process linguistic structures at the interface in their interlanguage.