---
title: "The processing of subject pronouns in highly proficient L2"
description: "Most research on how second-language speakers resolve pronouns has studied learners of null-subject languages such as… 29 references."
authors: ["Carla Contemori", "Paola E. Dussias"]
year: 2020
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5286/"
doi: "10.5334/gjgl.972"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/contemori-2020-processing-subject-pronouns-highly-proficient/"
---
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# The processing of subject pronouns in highly proficient L2 speakers of English

**Authors:** Carla Contemori and Paola E. Dussias · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2020/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.972) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5286/galley/12852/download) · [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.972](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.972) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3016272543)

**Citations:** 10 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Most research on how second-language speakers resolve pronouns has studied learners of null-subject languages such as Italian or Spanish. Even very advanced learners of those languages stay somewhat inconsistent. Evidence for learners of languages that require overt subjects is sparse and contradictory. Contemori and Dussias test whether Spanish speakers who are highly proficient in English interpret English subject pronouns in real time the way native speakers do. Their eye-tracking study uses the visual world paradigm and follows the design of Arnold et al. (2000). Listeners saw two characters on screen while hearing a short two-sentence story. The second sentence began with a pronoun that matched either only one character's gender or both. Native listeners rapidly used both the gender cue and the preference for the first-mentioned subject. The L2 group showed the same pattern without any delay, differing only in a weaker gender effect. The authors conclude that in simple discourse, L2 speakers can process the English overt pronoun natively as a marker of topic continuity. They note that contexts with equally salient referents may still be harder.

## Key points
- Participants were native English speakers and highly proficient L2 English speakers with L1 Spanish. The method was eye-tracking during listening, using a visual world paradigm.
- Each item had a first sentence with a subject referent and an object referent, followed by a sentence opening with a pronoun. The pronoun was either gender-ambiguous or gender-unambiguous. In the original Arnold et al. (2000) study with this design, cue effects appeared about 200 ms after pronoun offset.
- Both groups showed a first-mention bias for ambiguous pronouns and used gender to resolve unambiguous ones.
  - The L2 group showed no processing delay or cost.
  - The L2 group did look less at the target when gender was informative.
- The results agree with Cunnings et al. (2017), who studied intermediate Greek learners of English. They contrast with Roberts et al. (2008), who found a processing penalty in Turkish and German learners of Dutch using stories with two equally salient referents.
- Background: work by Filiaci and colleagues (2014), Chamorro (2018), and Contemori and colleagues (2019) shows that the biases of Spanish overt pronouns change depending on sentence structure. The Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (Carminati 2002) therefore does not fully predict Spanish, although it fits Italian well.

## Interesting ideas
- Crossing a categorical cue (gender agreement) with a graded cue (first-mention/subject salience) lets the experiment show how each cue contributes and that the categorical cue overrides the graded one. This decomposition suits any resolver that must justify its choice.
- The paper argues that difficulty appears mainly when candidate antecedents are similarly salient, not in ordinary subject-versus-object contexts. Evaluation should therefore be stratified by how far apart the candidates are in salience.
- The same overt pronoun signals topic continuity in English but tends to signal topic shift in Italian, and its bias in Spanish depends on structure. The meaning of a referring form is therefore language-specific, not universal.
- Measuring looks over time, rather than only the final choice, shows when each cue starts to act. This reveals whether a system's correct answer arrives directly or only after a detour.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): the coreference step could first filter antecedents by gender/number agreement, then rank the survivors by subject role and first mention, and record which cue decided each link.
- **I2** (learn): build a coreference test set split into clear-salience and equal-salience cases, and treat the equal-salience slice as a hard control so that good scores on easy cases cannot hide failures.
- **I3** (back): generation and translation through the meta-world should re-decide the referring form (pronoun, full NP, null subject) from the target language's continuity rules, rather than copying the source form.
- **I4** (frames): logging the candidate ranking as each token is processed could expose antecedent choices that are reached late or reversed, which helps when debugging explanations.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Pennsylvania State University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/pennsylvania-state-university/) — University, State College, United States · 67 works · 5,865 citations
- [The University of Texas at El Paso](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/the-university-of-texas-at-el-paso/) — University, El Paso, United States · 4 works · 17 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Carla Contemori and Paola E. Dussias. 2020. The processing of subject pronouns in highly proficient L2 speakers of English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{contemori2020processing,
  title = {{The processing of subject pronouns in highly proficient L2 speakers of English}},
  author = {Carla Contemori and Paola E. Dussias},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.972},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.972}
}
```

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## References

29 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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27. How to cite this article: Contemori, Carla and Paola E. Dussias. 2020. [The processing of subject pronouns in highly proficient L2 speakers of English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/contemori-2020-processing-subject-pronouns-highly-proficient/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 38. 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.972 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.972)
28. Accepted: 18 September 2019 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Accepted%3A+18+September+2019)
29. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

*Updated 29 October 2026*