Advanced Chinese EFL Learners' Mixed Use Of He/She: Evidence From Self-Paced Reading

The present study aims to investigate advanced Chinese EFL learners' mixed use of he/she from a perceptive point of view by adopting a self-paced reading task. It intends to test whether some potential factors derived from pronoun research do affect Chinese EFL learners' perception of the two pronouns, and to reveal cognitive basis for the occurrence of the mixed use of he/she. Subjects' individual differences in working memory span are also tested to see if the mixed use of he/she has something to do with subjects' working memory capacity.The following factors were selected as independent variables of the self-paced reading task, namely, 1) the gender of an antecedent, 2) the distance between an antecedent and its corresponding pronoun, 3) the match condition between an antecedent and its corresponding pronoun, and 4) the antecedent type, which indicated different degrees of prominence of gender information entailed in antecedents. Eachâ…£had two levels. Subjects' RT of the two pronouns he/she in different conditions were recorded and analyzed.Before the self-paced reading experiment was carried out, a preparatory rating study was conducted to decide on the antecedents with stereotypical genders (one level of the variable "the antecedent type") which were to appear in the self-paced reading task. Sixty-four antecedents with stereotypical genders which were considered to be appropriate for Chinese subjects were chosen according to the result of the rating study. A working memory span test was conducted to get each subject's score of working memory span.Results from the self-paced reading task indicated that Chinese EFL learners had a weaker awareness of the gender information entailed in antecedents, especially when an antecedent conveyed female gender information. Subjects tended to set the unmarked form he as the default pronoun form, and thus he was more likely to be overused to refer to both masculine and feminine antecedents than the marked form she was. It was suggested that the prominence of gender information entailed in antecedents had a significant effect on subjects' RTs, and when the gender information was prominent, subjects would spend less time on its corresponding pronoun. This implied that it was easier for Chinese EFL learners to encode the gender information with pronouns when the gender information was more prominent, and a mixed use mistake was less likely to happen. The effect of the distance between an antecedent and its corresponding pronoun was not verified due to the unexpected reading strategy subjects had adopted. The mixed use of he/she, on the whole, was not found to be closely correlated with subjects' working memory capacity.Taken together, the findings of the present study make it possible to conclude that Chinese EFL learners' weaker awareness of the female gender information entailed in antecedents, and the vagueness of gender information conveyed by antecedents may lead to Chinese EFL learners' mixed use of the two pronouns.