The effects of stress on the understanding of pronominal co-reference in children

Children aged 3, 4, and 5 years old were given sentences to act out in which the presence or absence of stress on a pronoun was critical to the reference of the pronoun. They were then divided up into three groups based on their proficiency in imitating sentences. Performance on unstressed pronouns was uniformly high in all three groups. Stressed pronouns were acted out like unstressed pronouns by the least advanced group, and improvement was radical from the lowest to highest groups. In the sentences used, unstressed pronouns could be interpreted by a natural cognitive strategy, in which the least change is required in the roles of the sentence actors. Early performance can be accounted for by use of this strategy. Interpretation of stressed pronouns required reversal of the role of one actor, which the less advanced children evidently found difficult. Results are discussed for their significance for theories of pronominal reference.This work was supported by the University of Minnesota Graduate School Grant #450-0350-4909-02.     

Conceptual Locations and Pronominal Reference in American Sign Language

We report the results of an experiment investigating the ramifications of using space to express coreference in American Sign Language (ASL). Nominals in ASL can be associated with locations in signing space, and pronouns are directed toward those locations to convey coreference. A probe recognition technique was used to investigate the case of "locus doubling" in which a single referent is associated with two distinct spatial locations. The experiment explored whether an ASL pronoun activates both its antecedent referent and the location associated with that referent. An introductory discourse associated a referent (e.g, MOTHER) with two distinct locations (eg., STOREleft, KITCHENright), and a continuation sentence followed that either contained a pronoun referring to the referent in one location or contained no anaphora (the control sentence). Twenty-four deaf participants made lexical decisions to probe signs presented during the continuation sentences. The probe signs were either the referent of the pronoun, the referent-location determined by the pronoun, or the most recently mentioned location (not referenced by the pronoun). The results indicated that response times to referent nouns were faster in the pronoun than in the no-pronoun control condition and that response times to the location signs did not differ across conditions. Thus, the spatial nature of coreference in ASL does not alter the processing mechanism underlying the on-line interpretation of pronouns. Pronouns activate only referent nouns, not spatial location nouns associated with the referent.     

Capacité de mémoire de travail et traitement du pronom chez l’enfant

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and reading comprehension in children by testing the processing of pronouns. Two groups of nine- to ten-year-old children classified as high span and low span were administered a pronoun processing task. In this task, the computation of the antecedent referent for pronouns was varied by manipulating the distance between the pronoun and its antecedent and the availability of a gender cue. The results showed that compared to high-span children, low-span children experienced more difficulties in computing a pronoun's referent. High-span children spent longer reading sentences containing anaphoric pronouns when pronouns could not be resolved on the basis of the gender alone, suggesting that the pronouns were resolved as they were read. Low-span children tended to delay resolution until it was required by the task. In the question-answering times, low-span children were more adversely affected by distance than high-span children. Altogether these findings support the view that working memory capacity constrains resolution of anaphoric pronouns in children.     

动词隐含因果性和重读对代词加工的影响

采用听觉动窗法和跨通道探测技术,设计3个实验考察了汉语口语句子理解中,动词隐含因果性和重读对代词加工的影响及其时间进程。其中的自变量为动词类型和韵律特征;探测实验中增加探测词类型变量。结果发现：动词隐含因果性影响代词的指认方向;当代词不重读时,动词隐含因果关系在遇到代词后立即影响代词可能先行词的激活水平。代词重读影响“因为”分句的阅读时间,且在代词后立即影响主语型动词语句中代词的加工     

整体语境和局部语境对代词理解的影响

通过眼动实验,考察了语篇理解中整体语境和局部语境对代词理解的影响。实验一是预备实验,发现名词与动词词组之间关系的典型性不同,整合的速度也不一样。实验二发现,代词的理解不是一次完成的,代词理解的初期受整体语境的语义偏向影响,而不受局部语境的影响。在第二阶段主要受到局部语境的影响。代词的理解过程比较符合Cook（2004）所提出的两阶段模型     

THE BACON not the bacon: how children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases

Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 ms after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children's on-line reference comprehension [Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes], showing that children's interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object.     

Comprehension of pronouns

An experiment is reported in which subjects had to choose referents for pronouns in sentences such as: John blamed Bill because he spilt the coffee. To examine whether the choice of referent is influenced by features of the main verb or by the events described in the sentence, the relation between the events was altered by changing the conjunction. A significant effect of conjunction was obtained, but only when both antecedents matched the gender of the pronoun. When only one antecedent matched the pronoun, referents were chosen faster. From these results it is argued that readers use general knowledge to select referents for pronouns when gender does not identify a unique referent. A further effect of sentence structure on the time taken to select a referent was interpreted as showing that subjects analysed the sentences clause by clause.     

The role of phonology in reading comprehension: Implications of the effects of homophones on processing sentences with referentially dependent categories

Two experiments investigated whether phonological representations are activated in the processing of anaphors in reading, and if they are, whether they play a role in the initial (first-pass) processing of the sentence or in review (second-pass) processes. Subjects made sentence acceptability judgements for sentences that contained either verb-gaps or indefinite and personal pronouns (overt anaphors). All sentences contained homophones. Half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically plausible if the homophones were inserted in the gap (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in cold blood) or used as the referent of the pronoun (e.g. There is a sale on at the store and I have one at the boat). The other half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically implausible. In both experiments, half of the subjects saw the sentences under normal viewing conditions (whole sentence condition); for the other half of the subjects the words of each sentence were presented sequentially in the centre of the video screen at the rate of 250 msec/word (RSVP condition). A large proportion of the phonologically implausible sentences in the first experiment contained phrases in the second clause which resulted in semantic “oddities” (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in the jar); the sentences in Experiment 2 did not contain such oddities. In Experiment 1 subjects made more errors on the phonologically plausible than implausible unacceptable sentences with both verb-gaps and pronouns in the whole sentence but not in the RSVP condition. There was no effect of phonological plausibility in Experiment 2. As the effect of phonological plausibility was only seen in the whole sentence condition, and only when the sentences contained semantic oddities, these data suggest that phonological information was not used in the first-pass analysis of the sentence, but rather when the subject re-read the sentence to find the referent.     

Semantic and phonological activation in noun and pronoun production

Speakers can refer to objects and other entities by nouns or pronouns. The present article investigated the production of gender-marked pronouns in German. Four picture-word interference experiments are reported, addressing 2 questions. First, is the lemma of a referent noun (i.e., the representation of the referent noun's semantic and syntactic properties) accessed when producing a pronoun? Second, if so, is this access confined to the lemma, or will the referent noun's phonological form be activated, too? The results suggest that in generating pronouns, speakers accessed the lemma of the referent noun, whereas its phonological form was not substantially activated. The results are discussed in the context of other recent experimental studies of pronoun and noun production.     

Listening comprehension for sentences: the accessibility of referents for pronouns as a function of age, topic continuity, and pronoun emphasis.

An auditory comprehension task was employed to determine how subjects (20 first graders, 20 fifth graders, and 20 adults) use topic continuity and contrastive emphasis in the assignment of referents for pronouns in sentences. Significant differences in performance for emphasized and unemphasized pronouns were found suggesting that subjects used contrastive emphasis when assigning referents for pronouns. Fifth graders overused the cue of topic continuity in assigning referents for emphasized pronouns. This effect has not been shown previously in studies of children's understanding of pronomial reference. An interaction between age and pronoun emphasis was also significant. This interaction suggests that developmental changes continued to take place in the learning of cues for resolving pronouns by school age children.     

Effects of gender marking in pronominal coindexation.

The naming latency of a pronoun was measured when a single previously presented name in a discourse either agreed or did not agree with the pronoun in gender and person. An effect of agreement was found both under conditions in which subjects were likely to have engaged in strategic processing of the pronoun (Experiment 1) and under conditions in which this was unlikely (Experiment 3). The effect of gender agreement was also investigated when two noun phrases were present in the discourse. The results continued to show an immediate effect of gender agreement (naming latencies increased when a pronoun did not agree with one of two previously presented nouns) under experimental conditions likely to engender strategic processing (Experiment 2). This last effect was not significant under experimental conditions that were not likely to engender strategic processing (Experiment 3). The results are discussed in terms of models of the process of identifying the referent of a pronoun in a discourse.     

Why do Alzheimer patients have difficulty with pronouns? Working memory, semantics, and reference in comprehension and production in Alzheimer's disease

Three experiments investigated the extent to which semantic and working-memory deficits contribute to Alzheimer patients' impairments in producing and comprehending referring expressions. In Experiment 1, the spontaneous speech of 11 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) contained a greater ratio of pronouns to full noun phrases than did the spontaneous speech produced by 9 healthy controls. Experiments 2 and 3 used a cross-modal naming methodology to compare reference comprehension in another group of 10 patients and 10 age-matched controls. In Experiment 2, patients were less sensitive than healthy controls to the grammatical information necessary for processing pronouns. In Experiment 3, patients were better able to remember referent information in short paragraphs when reference was maintained with full noun phrases rather than pronouns, but healthy controls showed the reverse pattern. Performance in all three experiments was linked to working memory performance but not to word finding difficulty. We discuss these findings in terms of a theory of reference processing, the Informational Load Hypothesis, which views referential impairments in AD as the consequence of normal discourse processing in the context of a working memory impairment.     

Changes Over Time in the Comprehension of <Emphasis Type="Italic">He</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">They</Emphasis> as Epicene Pronouns

An epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral singular pronoun used in sentences when the gender of the subject is unknown or unspecified. In English, he and they are commonly-used epicene pronouns. Until recently, he has been widely accepted as being grammatically correct. However, many have argued that he is sexist because it may bias people to think about males. Two experiments were performed using a lexical decision task in which participants reacted to gendered words (e.g., aunt and uncle) after reading sentences using he, they, or unrelated epicene pronouns. We conducted the experiments 15 years apart in order to explore whether change in pronoun usage and the social significance of pronouns would be associated with different priming effects. Both experiments demonstrated that pronouns influence the processing of gendered nouns. However, in Experiment 1 they facilitated the processing of feminine nouns whereas in Experiment 2, he slowed the processing of feminine nouns. We discuss these results with respect to language change and conclude that they is a more effective epicene.     

Who Did What to Whom? Children Track Story Referents First in Gesture

Children achieve increasingly complex language milestones initially in gesture or in gesture+speech combinations before they do so in speech, from first words to first sentences. In this study, we ask whether gesture continues to be part of the language-learning process as children begin to develop more complex language skills, namely narratives. A key aspect of narrative development is tracking story referents, specifying who did what to whom. Adults track referents primarily in speech by introducing a story character with a noun phrase and then following the same referent with a pronoun—a strategy that presents challenges for young children. We ask whether young children can track story referents initially in communications that combine gesture and speech by using character viewpoint in gesture to introduce new story characters, before they are able to do so exclusively in speech using nouns followed by pronouns. Our analysis of 4- to 6-year-old children showed that children introduced new characters in gesture+speech combinations with character viewpoint gestures at an earlier age than conveying the same referents exclusively in speech with the use of nominal phrases followed by pronouns. Results show that children rely on viewpoint in gesture to convey who did what to whom as they take their first steps into narratives.     

Informativity renders a referent more accessible: Evidence from eyetracking

The amount of information attached to a noun phrase (henceforth, NP) has been shown to enhance accessibility and increase pronominal reference in language production. However, both the effect of information quantity on the comprehension of ambiguous pronouns and the time course of any informativity effect have been left unexplored. In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated how additional information on the part of NP referents influenced the resolution of following ambiguous pronouns. The results of the first experiment revealed an informativity effect, with more looks to the informationally richer referent than to the competitor. However, the effect of additional information emerged late in time when the referent was the object of the verb. The second experiment replicated the results of the first and also showed that, consistent with the online results, an ambiguous pronoun is interpreted as referring to the informationally richer NP in an offline, explicit pronoun resolution task. The results lend support to theories of language processing that assume that explicit information increases the accessibility of the associated concept, in contrast to approaches that assume that accessibility is associated with givenness.     

Pronominal Resolution and Gap Filling in Agrammatic Aphasia: Evidence from Eye Movements

This paper reports the results of three studies examining comprehension and real-time processing of pronominal (Experiment 1) and Wh-movement (Experiments 2 and 3) structures in agrammatic and unimpaired speakers using eyetracking. We asked the following questions: (a) Is off-line comprehension of these constructions impaired in agrammatic listeners?, (b) Do agrammatic, like unimpaired, listeners show eye movement patterns indicative of automatic pronominal reference resolution and/or gap-filling?, and (c) Do eyetracking patterns differ when sentences are correctly versus incorrectly interpreted, or do automatic processes prevail in spite of comprehension failure? Results showed that off-line comprehension of both pronoun and Wh-movement structures was impaired in our agrammatic cohort. However, the aphasic participants showed visual evidence of real-time reference resolution as they processed binding structures, including both pronouns and reflexives, as did our unimpaired control participants. Similarly, both the patients and the control participants showed patterns consistent with successful gap filling during processing of Wh-movement structures. For neither pronominal nor movement structures did we find evidence of delayed processing. Notably, these patterns were found for the aphasic participants even when they incorrectly interpreted target sentences, with the exception of object relative constructions. For incorrectly interpreted sentences, we found end of sentence lexical competition effects. These findings indicate that aberrant lexical integration, rather than representational deficits or generally slowed processing, may underlie agrammatic aphasic listener’s comprehension failure.     

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112–143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants’ eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.     

The Use of Contextual Information Related to General World Knowledge by Right Brain-Damaged Individuals in Pronoun Resolution

This study investigated the ability of right brain-damaged individuals (RBD) to use contextual information to resolve ambiguous pronouns. Subjects were presented with sentence pairs and required to resolve the ambiguous pronoun in the second sentence. Contrary to the prevailing view that RBD patients have difficulty using contextual information to integrate language, the RBD group demonstrated a normal pattern of response, demonstrating a sensitivity to the pragmatic information contained in the leading sentence. They responded more quickly to sentences with a pragmatically constrained preferred referent than to those sentences for which there was no preferred referent. As well, they chose the preferred referent significantly more often than the non-preferred referent. These results suggest that RBD patients can use contextual information at the level of a minimal discourse (i.e., two sentences).