The study of cognitive representations and processes involved in personal pronoun interpretation allows one to investigate on a small scale the cognitive representations and processes of discourse comprehension. A review of the literature identifies four fundamental processes in personal pronoun interpretation: (A) syntactic constrains application, (B) gender, number, and person matching, (C) inferential selection, and, (D) discourse focus updating. A preliminary data collection from human performance has shown the importance of the application of syntactic constrains for pronoun interpretation. However, the level of specification for the representations and processes attained by the literature review and the preliminary experiment is not sufficient, therefore justifying the development of a more elaborate on-line pronoun interpretation process model. In order to attain a better model of the personal pronoun interpretation processes, the research approach has been to: (A) establish a strong link between the text linguistic features on one hand, and the cognitive representations and processes on the other hand through the construction-interpretation model, and (B) to reduce the gap between the experimental task specificity, and the general cognitive representations and processes assumed by the model. A second experiment, using experimental texts implementing a combination of many levels of representation, verified most of the model predictions. The model of the four interpretation processes as well as the empirical evidences support a point of view where the interpretation process for personal pronouns ends at various points during reading. The compound process of syntactic analysis and progressive semantic interpretation as well as the component processes associated with specific levels of representation explain the partiality of the pronoun interpretation process. The construction-interpretation model shows that the location of the execution of the interpretatio

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This study analyzes students' use of the French second-person pronouns tu (T) and vous (V) in small-group (2-3 students) inter-learner online chat sessions. The influence of internal linguistic factors (i.e., turn type and morphosyntactic environment) on learners' appropriate vs. inappropriate use of these pronouns is considered. The study also investigates the influence of Instructional Level on tu-vous use and the extent to which students from different instructional levels provide various types of peer assistance (e.g., lexical, morphosyntactic, and sociolinguistic/pragmatic) . Pronoun use was extremely unstable for learners of all levels, and a Kruskal-Wallis analysis revealed that Instructional Level did not significantly affect appropriate T/V use overall. Instructional Level and Syntax did, however, significantly affect interrogative T/V use, as shown through multivariate analyses. Peer-assisted performance was limited to lexical retrieval. Pedagogical recommendations are presented for teaching and learning second-person pronouns in French.