On March 18, 2021 Kerry Sluchinski and Jordan Gallant presented on Gendered & Non-Gendered Pronoun Resolution which focused on the use of TA in comparison to 她 ‘she’ and 他 ‘he’ at Discourse in Corpus and Experimental Data: Bridging the Methodological Gap [DisCorX 2021].

The project would not have been possible without the help of our many participants to whom we wish to extend our gratitude and share a general update regarding the findings. 

To review and/or download the original abstract of the study written in 2020, please visit Research Gate.

Experiment 1: Maze Task

• Male pronoun 他 seems to act as a default
• TA was more likely to be chosen when paired with the female pronoun
• TA seems to fill a pragmatic niche

Experiment 2: Occupations

• Male pronoun 他 seems to act as a default
• TA is the most difficult to integrate
• TA forces the reader to fill in gender information

Experiment 3 [originally Experiment 1]: Kinship

• When the gender of the antecedent is not embodied, TA is more difficult to resolve
• When the gender of the antecedent is embodied, TA is resolved just as easily as other gendered pronouns