Grammatical determinants of ambiguous pronoun resolution

Crawley et al. (1990) argue for the primacy of a subject assignment strategy for pronoun assignment during reading, and against the notion of parallel function (Sheldon, 1974). However, most of their items deviated from parallel structure, and none included subject pronouns. In four experiments with subject and nonsubject pronouns, strong parallel function effects emerge when a potential antecedent has the same syntactic role as the pronoun and when the two clauses have the same attachment site and constituent structure. Attachment nonparallelism causes the greatest ambiguity, while the other types lead to more subject assignment overall, although there is always an overlaid parallel function effect. These observations support a model of pronoun assignment according to which potential antecedents are checked for morphological, syntactic and semantic feature matches with the pronoun, and priming/reactivation of syntactic structure across clauses facilitates parallel assignment.This research was supported in part by research grant 410-89-0395 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A preliminary version of the paper was presented at the 1992 meetings of the Canadian Linguistic Association in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I would like to thank Elizabeth Cowper, Keren Rice, Rosemary Stevenson, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments.     

Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject-preference accounts

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.     

Effects of antecedent order and semantic context on Chinese pronoun resolution

Three reading time experiments were conducted in order to examine the relative contributions of order of antecedents and semantic context to the resolution of temporarily ambiguous Chinese pronouns. These pronouns were ambiguous because each of them was preceded by two antecedents, both of which were likely candidates for coreference. The identity of the pronoun was revealed by subsequent disambiguating information that constrained the pronoun to one particular interpretation. Experiment 1 showed that reading of the disambiguating phrase was slower when the phrase confined the pronoun to the second rather than to the first antecedent. Experiment 2 produced the same effect of antecedent order (first vs. second antecedent) regardless of whether the target antecedent was an action-performing or an action-receiving entity. In Experiment 3, the order effect was eliminated by a biasing modifier inserted immediately before the pronoun. These results indicate that in a semantically neutral environment, the first-appearing antecedent is the preferred candidate for coreferencing the ambiguous Chinese pronoun. The interaction between order of antecedents and semantic context (in the form of preposed biasing modifiers) suggests that the initial comprehension of Chinese pronouns depends as much on contextual as on structural factors.     

常识性知识和语篇语境对代词指认的影响

本研究围绕中文代词理解中, 读者的常识性知识和语篇语境的作用以及作用时程这一问题展开。实验1首先探讨在中文阅读理解中, 职业性别倾向这种常识性信息是否能对代词的指认产生早期影响。存在一致和冲突(如警卫-他; 警卫-她)两个实验条件, 结果在凝视时间、重读时间和总阅读时间上都发现了职业性别倾向所引发的性别冲突效应。实验2在实验1基础上增加一个代词(如：警卫-他-他; 警卫-她-她), 考察更正后的信息, 即文本语境内容是否可以覆盖常识的作用对代词加工产生影响。结果发现语篇语境确实可以覆盖常识性信息的作用, 对代词加工产生早期影响。但是, 职业性别倾向这种常识性知识仍然在代词加工的后期阶段发挥作用。考虑到代词所形成的语境较为含蓄, 实验3中采用更明确的方式来界定职业名称的性别, 例如男艺人、爸爸等, 然后再出现一个代词, 代词的性别始终和先前的性别描述一致, 而与职业性别倾向冲突, 这样也存在一致和冲突两个条件(例如：保姆-妻子-她, 警卫-妻子-她), 结果发现只有更正后的语境信息对代词加工产生影响, 职业性别倾向不再发挥作用。说明在中文这种高语境依赖性的语言文字中, 语境可以覆盖常识性知识对代词加工产生早期作用。但是, 语境作用的持续性问题会受到语篇语境中性别信息明确程度的影响。     

Processing biological gender and number information during Chinese pronoun resolution: ERP evidence for functional differentiation

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and the processing of notional number information can be differentiated and to what extent they might interact during Chinese pronoun resolution. The pronoun (with singular form in Experiment 1 and with plural form in Experiment 2) in a sentence matched its antecedent or mismatched it with respect to either biological gender or notional number or both. While the number mismatch elicited a P600 effect starting from 550 ms (for singular pronoun) or 400 ms (for plural pronoun) post-onset of the pronoun, the gender mismatch elicited an earlier (for singular) and larger (for both singular and plural) P600 effect. More importantly, the double mismatch produced a P600 effect identical to the effect elicited by the single gender mismatch. These results demonstrate that biological gender information and notional number information are processed differentially and have different processing priorities during Chinese pronoun resolution.     

The rapid use of gender information: evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking

Eye movements of listeners were monitored to investigate how gender information and accessibility influence the initial processes of pronoun interpretation. Previous studies on this issue have produced mixed results, and several studies have concluded that gender cues are not automatically used during the early processes of pronoun interpretation (e.g. Garnham, A., Oakhill, J. & Cruttenden, H. (1992). The role of implicit causality and gender cue in the interpretation of pronouns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 73 (4), 231-255; Greene, S. B., McKoon, G. & Ratcliff, R. (1992). Pronoun resolution and discourse models. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 182, 266-283). In the two experiments presented here, participants viewed a picture with two familiar cartoon characters of either same or different gender. They listened to a text describing the picture, in which a pronoun referred to either the first, more accessible, character, or the second. (For example, Donald is bringing some mail to ?Mickey/Minnie? while a violent storm is beginning. He's carrying an umbrellaellipsis.) The results of both experiments show rapid use of both gender and accessibility at approximately 200 ms after the pronoun offset.     

A model of three-choice discrimination learning under complete and incomplete feedback conditions

The Bower and Trabasso model of concept identification was extended to cover problems in which three stimuli were presented simultaneously and S pointed to the one he thought was correct. The E gave complete feedback by indicating the correct stimulus, or incomplete feedback by saying “correct” or “wrong.” The model accurately accounted for the significant difference in total errors between the two feedback conditions by incorporating process assumptions reflecting the logical difference in information content of the two types of feedback. Using a single set of parameter estimates, the model made satisfactory quantitative predictions of several statistics for both feedback conditions. Some deviations from the model's predictions were found in the length of terminal error runs, indicating that Ss were possibly using memory more extensively than posited by the model.     

Testing indirect effect with a complete or incomplete dichotomous mediator

Past methodological research on mediation analysis mainly focused on situations where all variables were complete and continuous. When issues of categorical data occur combined with missing data, more methodological considerations are involved. Specifically, appropriate decisions need to be made on estimation methods of the indirect effects and on confidence intervals for testing the indirect effects with accommodations of missing data. We compare strategies that address these issues based on a model with a dichotomous mediator, aiming to provide guidelines for researchers facing such challenges in practice.     

Factors influencing assignment of pronoun antecedents

In two experiments a group of adult subjects and a group of 10 – 13 year old subjects completed sentences of the format NP1 V NP2 because Pro… The fragment, John telephoned Bill because he…, elicited completions such as had good news, which locate the impetus for telephoning in NP1 (John). The fragment, John admired Bill because he…, elicited completions such as was a fine athlete, which locate the impetus for admiring in NP2 (Bill). The assignment of the subject pronoun of the second clause as coreferential with NP1 or NP2 shows that this choice depends on a factor, direction of causality, which may be assigned to verb roots. This factor was isolated from interacting semantic and syntactic features of sentences in which the verbs occurred. Manipulation of these features resulted in greater or lesser salience of the direction of causality factor. The potential of this technique for investigation of verb semantics and for interaction of semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features in the psychological study of comprehension is discussed.     

Career engagement: bridging career counseling and employee engagement

A model of career engagement is presented to help bridge the gap between career counselors' focus on supporting individuals to find meaningful work and employers' desire for an engaged, productive, and committed workforce.     

Pictorial context and the recall of pronoun sentences

Summary Acting on the assumption that pictures affect the processing of sentences only when providing additional information, the authors used pictures, which in an earlier experiment had failed to influence the retention of noun sentences, as illustrations to semantically undefined pronoun sentences, thus establishing a distinct information gradient between sentence and picture. These pronoun sentences were presented to 48 subjects for recall, in four pictorial conditions: without picture, with unambiguous picture, with subject-ambiguous, and with object-ambiguous picture. As hypothesized, picture-less pronoun sentences were more poorly recalled than picture-enriched pronoun sentences. Moreover, sentences accompanied by subject-ambiguous pictures, in which the grammatical subject could not be clearly identified, scored lower than the same sentences with unambiguous or object-ambiguous pictures. The findings invite a communication-theory analysis of the experimental situation, for which Searle's theory of speech acts is invoked.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mr. B. Jankowski in the translation of this paper from an original German version.     

Psycholinguistic research in language intervention programming: The pronoun system

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of the pronoun system in terms of binary semantic and syntactic features. A model is presented which indicates how these features serve to differentiate among the members of this set. A hypothetical order of development of these features is proposed, supported by developmental data. Suggestions are made regarding the possible relationship of the pronoun system to other areas of language. Finally, proposals are presented for the development of pronoun training procedures within the context of language training programs.This research was supported in part by Speech and Hearing grant HD 05088 and in part by CORE grant HD 02528.     

Pronominalization and discourse coherence,discourse structure and pronoun interpretation

Two self-paced reading-time experiments are reported that examine the time course of pronoun interpretation processes based on local discourse structure and on world knowledge. The characterization of local discourse structure is based on recent work on centering, which provides a specific formulation of how the ways in which sentences make reference to common entities determines the coherence of discourse segments and how discourse structure influences interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. The results of the first experiment show that readers generate a default interpretation of a pronoun based on features of local discourse structure, and that that default interpretation is later confirmed or overridden by knowledge-based processes. The results of the second experiment show that local discourse structure continues to influence pronoun interpretation even when the semantic information that ultimately compels interpretation occurs before the pronoun. These results support the view that processes acting on local discourse structure play a powerful role in guiding language comprehension.     

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.     

The paradox of the first person singular pronoun

The author attempts to provide a characterization of statements which will avoid the twin perils of identifying them with sentences per se or with such non‐observable entities as “propositions”, “meanings” etc. In providing a positive account of the sorts of things statements are, he distinguishes between the utterances of sentences, and. sentences per se, and maintains that statements are to be identified with those utterances made in certain kinds of circumstances. In the light of this analysis, it is then argued that who or what the speaker refers to in the course of making a statement does not form part of the circumstances which determine what statement he is making, nor does it form part of the circumstances which determine whether he is making the same or different statements by the words he uses.     

The influence of morphological information on cataphoric pronoun assignment

In 3 eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the use of morphological information during pronoun resolution. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that disruption occurred when a preferred assignment was inconsistent with gender information. Experiment 2 ensured that this difficulty was not due to the introduction of a new discourse entity. Experiment 3 showed that disruption also occurred when number information was inconsistent with the preferred assignment. The results indicate that the use of morphological information is delayed until after the computation of coreference relations.     

Effects of ownership expressed by the first-person possessive pronoun

The present study examined the behavioral effects of the first-person possessive pronoun. In each trial, a noun (e.g. cup or bread) was presented to participants after visual presentation of a possessive pronoun “wo de” (Chinese for “my”) or “ta de” (Chinese for “his”), which formed ownership. Half participants were assigned to contextual encoding (CE) condition in which they were required to judge whether they liked the item expressed by a noun from the first or third-person perspective. The rest were assigned to perceptual encoding (PE) condition in which they were asked to judge what color the noun was. A subsequent recall test was performed. The results showed that there were significant memory and response advantages for nouns in “my” ownership under both conditions. The results were discussed with reference to self-specificity and other effects in the current study.     

Language and interpersonal cognition: causal effects of variations in pronoun usage on perceptions of closeness

Four studies examined the hypothesis that subtle language variations can have a causal impact on perceptions of relationships. In interpersonal interactions, language can function implicitly to reflect, perpetuate, and communicate relationship perceptions. Previous research has shown that interpersonal closeness and plural pronoun use are correlated; the current research demonstrates that manipulating pronoun use can lead people to perceive their own and other relationships as closer and higher in quality. In Study 1, participants who read about a relationship that was described using the pronoun we versus she and I perceived the relationship to be closer and of higher quality. Study 2 showed that pronoun variations similarly affected perceptions of participants' own ongoing relationships; Study 3 showed similar effects for perceptions of an actual interpersonal interaction. Study 4 examined potential mechanisms of this effect.