"Avoid Repeating Words"

If you thought this old adage was just a prescriptive rule, think again. In this case, it turns out our language processing system may well be hardwired to penalize repetition, especially when it comes to named entities.

The “repeated-name penalty” (RNP) refers to a well-established psycholinguistic phenomenon whereby language users take longer to process repeated names (cf. pronouns) associated with salient antecedents. Sounds like Greek to you? Consider the following example: “Ron scorned Iris due to differences in political view. In the last election, Ron voted for a Republican.” Simply put, to refer to “Ron” in the first sentence, a repeated name (i.e., “Ron”) has a higher psycholinguistic cost than a pronoun (e.g., “he”).

The RNP had been consistently demonstrated in English, Chinese and Spanish, but little was known whether this effect extended to other languages and could thus be guided by universal language principles. In this project, I replicated the RNP in Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese and Italian via off-line acceptability judgement surveys, as well as self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments. The studies also revealed some important cross-linguistic differences when it comes to the exact form and timing of the psycholinguistic phenomenon.

Publications in English:
Co-referential processing of pronouns and repeated names in Italian
Publications in Portuguese:
Referenciação e técnicas experimentais
O processamento de expressões referenciais em português
Processamento correferencial de nomes e pronomes plenos em PB
O processamento de expressões correferenciais em português brasileiro

Please refer to my CV or my ResearchGate for additional information.