Response about Gender Congruence Effect - Article Example

To clarify this, the authors conducted two experiments using Finnish, a non-gendered language. Like English, Finnish language speakers produce fewer pronouns when the competitor and the referent have the same gender. Furthermore, this effect does not result from ambiguity avoidance. Competitors’ gender congruence and reduction of pronouns are higher in the English language than in Finnish.

In English, avoiding gender-ambiguous pronouns is easy because semantic competition is normally affected by gender congruence. Discussion and comments on the article On reading this article, my knowledge was widened on what drives the effect of gender congruence in the English language. I knew that the gender congruence effect in the English language was driven by ambiguity avoidance. Initially, I assumed that the way speakers refer to expressions was based on the congruence effect alone. To enhance my understanding, I examined Van Campbell, Fukumura, Harley, and Pickering's (2011) study, which investigated how similarity in different entities affects a speaker’s choice and reference to some expression. . Conversely, more pronouns are produced when the competitor and the referent are in different situations.

The congruent effect appeared to be high in a situation in which the action described was relevant to the situational congruence. This implies that the effects that come as a result of congruence will depend on other representations of concepts known by the speaker. In the second experiment, this study revealed that whether a pronoun is ambiguous or not, the effect of competitor’s similarity is always present. In the end, the researchers concluded that the similarity effects are independent of ambiguity avoidance.

The effect emanates from a speaker’s internal production challenges. Still, Van Campbell et al. (2011) results are similar in the explanation of how ambiguity avoidance relates to the similarity or congruent effect. However, the studies use different approaches in investigating the effect of congruence on ambiguity avoidance. Both articles revealed that the congruence effect is independent of ambiguity avoidance. In the main article by Fukuruma, Hyena, and Merete (2013), it is revealed that because congruence impact semantic competition, a speaker is aware of the pronoun ambiguity.

This makes the congruence effect independent. Conversely, Van Compbel et al. (2011) study confirms that it is the internal speaker production constraints that make the congruence effect independent of ambiguity avoidance. Further, the similarity between these two articles drew my attention to another study by Arnold and Griffin (2007). The article investigated how one chooses between proper names and pronouns in a speech.