Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When making a reference, speakers must choose between nouns and pronouns. At what level of representation do speakersmake such a choice? The non-linguistic competition account predicts that the choice of using a pronoun occurs at thenon-linguistic level, so speakers should use fewer pronouns when the potential referents compete more strongly at thenon-linguistic level. By contrast, the linguistic competition account predicts that the pronoun choice occurs at the lexicallevel; speakers should use fewer pronouns when the potential antecedents are semantically or phonologically more similar.We show that regardless of whether the selection of a pronoun requires access to the antecedent (French pronouns) ornot (English pronouns, Italian null pronouns), speakers use fewer pronouns and more repeated nouns when the referentialcandidates compete more strongly in the non-linguistic context, whilst the similarities of their linguistic antecedents playno role. The finding provide support for the non-linguistic competition account.