Comprehension of marked pronouns in Spanish and English: Object anaphors cross-linguistically

Previous research on pronoun resolution has identified several individual factors that are deemed to be important for resolving reference. In this paper, we argue that of these factors, as tested here, plausibility is the most important, but interacts with form markedness and structural parallelism. We investigated how listeners resolved object pronouns that were ambiguous in the sense of having more than one possible antecedent. We manipulated the form of the anaphoric expression in terms of accentuation (English: Experiments 1a and 2a) and morphology (Spanish: Experiments 1b and 2b). We looked at sentences where both antecedents were equally plausible, or where only one of the antecedents was plausible. Listeners generally resolved toward the (parallel) grammatical object of the previous clause. When the pronouns were marked due to accentuation (English) or use of specific morphology (Spanish), preference switched to the alternative antecedent, the grammatical subject of the previous clause. In contrast, when one of the two antecedents was a much more plausible antecedent than the other, antecedent choice was almost wholly dictated by plausibility, although reference form prominence did significantly attenuate the strength of the preference.     

Sentence comprehension and relative pronouns

Doubly self-embedded sentences, differing only in whether the relative pronouns were present or deleted, were presented to two groups of Ss who were required to respond to a word beginning with a particular letter in each sentence and to paraphrase the sentence. The results of both the phoneme monitor task and the paraphrase task indicated that comprehension was better when the relative pronouns were present than when they were deleted. These results are consistent with earlier results for the paraphrase task but are not consistent with earlier results for the phoneme monitor task. Possible reasons for the inconsistency were considered. It was concluded that the phoneme monitor task does reflect comprehension difficulty in a manner consistent with the paraphrase task and that deleting the relative pronouns does make comprehending self-embedded sentences more difficult.     

Teaching pronouns to individuals with autism

It is well documented that individuals with autism often have significant difficulty with learning to use pronouns appropriately. It does not appear, however, that published studies have systematically investigated teaching procedures for these skills. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a teaching procedure to increase correct pronoun usage as a listener and speaker across four different pronoun pairs (i.e., mine/yours, I/you, me/you, and my/your) using a multiple‐probe design (across pronoun pairs). One participant with autism was taught to discriminate between mine/yours, I/you, me/you, and my/your as both a listener and a speaker. Generalization of the participant's behavior was obtained across novel instructors, places, and stimuli.     

Opacity,coreference, and pronouns

The problem discussed here is to find a basis for a uniform treatment of the relation between pronouns and their antecedents, taking into account both linguists' and philosophers' approaches. The two main candidates would appear to be the linguists' notion of coreference and the philosophers' notion of pronouns as variables. The notion of coreference can be extended to many but not all cases where the antecedent is non-referential. The pronouns-as-variables approach appears to come closer to full generality, but there are some examples of pronouns of laziness which appear to resist either of the two approaches.Earlier versions of this paper, under various titles, were presented orally to the Claremont Philosophical Discussion Group, the UCLA Linguistics Colloquium, the IBM Watson Research Center, the IBM Systems Development Division at Endicott, and at Princeton University. Criticisms and suggestions received on these occasions have helped lead to many revisions and additions. I am particularly grateful for the sympathetic encouragement given me by philosophers such as David Kaplan, Jack Vickers, and Gilbert Harman in this attempt to communicate simultaneously with linguists and philosophers.The most important sources for the present work are the following: among linguists, Postal (1968), for bringing the notion of coreference to prominence; Bach (1969, 1970), for first pointing out some fundamental problems with the treatment of pronominalization as a substitution process; McCawley [1967 (forthcoming), 1968], for his attempts to show logical notation, including the use of variables, to be of linguistic relevance; and Karttunen (1968a, b, 1968a, b), who has been exploring many of the same problems as are discussed here, and from whom a number of the examples below are taken or adapted (some of which are originally due to Baker (1966)). Among philosophers, the main sources are Quine (1960), for the notion of opacity and its relation to reference; Donnellan (1966), for claiming a referential/attributive distinction in definite noun phrases even in transparent contexts; and Geach (1962) for distinguishing pronouns of laziness from pronouns used like variables.     

Lexical access in the production of pronouns

Speakers can use pronouns when their conceptual referents are accessible from the preceding discourse, as in 'The flower is red. It turns blue'. Theories of language production agree that in order to produce a noun semantic, syntactic, and phonological information must be accessed. However, little is known about lexical access to pronouns. In this paper, we propose a model of pronoun access in German. Since the forms of German pronouns depend on the grammatical gender of the nouns they replace, the model claims that speakers must access the syntactic representation of the replaced noun (its lemma) to select a pronoun. In two experiments using the lexical decision during naming paradigm [Levelt, W.J.M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A.S., Pechmann, T., Havinga, J., 1991a. The time course of lexical access in speech production: a study of picture naming. Psychological Review 98, 122-142], we investigated whether lemma access automatically entails the activation of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is only activated when the noun itself is produced, but not when it is replaced by a pronoun. Experiment 1 showed that during pronoun production the phonological form of the replaced noun is activated. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this phonological activation was not a residual of the use of the noun in the preceding sentence. Thus, when a pronoun is produced, the lemma and the phonological form of the replaced noun become reactivated.     

Antecedent frequency effects during the processing of pronouns

An eye-movement reading experiment investigated whether the ease with which pronouns are processed is affected by the lexical frequency of their antecedent. Reading times following pronouns with infrequent antecedents were faster than following pronouns with frequent antecedents. We argue that this is consistent with a saliency account, according to which infrequent antecedents are more salient than frequent antecedents. The results are not predicted by accounts which claim that readers access all or part of the lexical properties of the antecedent during the processing of pronouns.     

Learning the deictic meaning of third person pronouns

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Forty-two children (2;8–5;7) viewed video-taped “scenes” in which a SPEAKER addressed sentences containing a personal pronoun which refereed...     

Semantic components in children's errors with pronouns

In the presence of the experimenter and two dolls, children were asked to respond to sentences containing pronous which required distinctions to be made on the basis of person, number, and gender, such as “Point tomy (your, his, her, our, their) feet.” Errors tended to maintain distinctions; for example,we was treated as if it meantI (maintaining first person) orthey (maintaining plural) more often than could be accounted for by a response-bias model. Furthermore, there were consistent individual differences in the kinds of distinctions that were difficult; some subjects has more trouble with number, others with person. These findings support the notion that errors made during acquisition result from dropping only part of the correct meaning, and they suggest that individuals may differ in the relative strengths of different components.     

In search of referents for nouns and pronouns

In comprehending a sentence, people normally try to identify the objects, events, and states referred to by its definite noun phrases. In Experiment 1, subjects took less time comprehending a sentence when the referents of such noun phrases were mentioned one sentence back than when they were mentioned two or three sentences back. There appeared to be a discontinuity between the first and second sentences back. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that it was most likely the first clause back, not the first sentence back, that was critical. These findings suggest that, independent of other factors, the last clause processed grants the entities it mentions a privileged place in working memory. They are readily available to be referred to by nouns and pronouns.     

Processing reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrase

Binding theory (e.g., Chomsky, 1981) has played a central role in both syntactic theory and models of language processing. Its constraints are designed to predict that the referential domains of pronouns and reflexives are nonoverlapping, that is, are complementary; these constraints are also thought to play a role in online reference resolution. The predictions of binding theory and its role in sentence processing were tested in four experiments that monitored participants' eye movements as they followed spoken instructions to have a doll touch a picture belonging to another doll. The instructions used pronouns and reflexives embedded in picture noun phrases (PNPs) containing possessor phrases (e.g., Pick up Ken. Have Ken touch Harry's picture of himself). Although the interpretations assigned to pronouns were generally consistent with binding theory, reflexives were frequently assigned interpretations that violated binding theory. In addition, the timing and pattern of eye movements were inconsistent with models of language processing that assume that binding theory acts as an early filter to restrict the referential domain. The interpretations assigned to reflexives in PNPs with possessors suggest that they are binding-theory-exempt logophors, a conclusion that unifies the treatment of reflexives in PNPs.     

Shallow processing of ambiguous pronouns: Evidence for delay

Two self-paced reading-time experiments examined how ambiguous pronouns are interpreted under conditions that encourage shallow processing. In Experiment 1 we show that sentences containing ambiguous pronouns are processed at the same speed as those containing unambiguous pronouns under shallow processing, but more slowly under deep processing. We outline three possible models to account for the shallow processing of ambiguous pronouns. Two involve an initial commitment followed by possible revision, and the other involves a delay in interpretation. In Experiment 2 we provide evidence that supports the delayed model of ambiguous pronoun resolution under shallow processing. We found no evidence to support a processing system that makes an initial commitment to an interpretation of the pronoun when it is encountered. We extend the account of pronoun resolution proposed by Rigalleau, Caplan, and Baudiffier (2004) to include the treatment of ambiguous pronouns under shallow processing.     

Inference and children's comprehension of pronouns

Two experiments are reported that investigate the ability of 5 year olds to determine the reference of anaphoric pronouns. The first study shows that children have problems coping with more than one pronoun in a sentence and if they have to draw an inference to define the reference of a pronoun. The second study shows that the difficulty in assigning reference is not due to children merely forgetting the premise information but is due to the difficulty of carrying out the inference. There is an indication in the second study that some of the children may be using a syntactically oriented rule (that the pronoun should be assigned to a noun phrase that has a parallel function in the previous sentence), and that they are not drawing the appropriate inferences.     

Shallow processing of ambiguous pronouns: evidence for delay

Two self-paced reading-time experiments examined how ambiguous pronouns are interpreted under conditions that encourage shallow processing. In Experiment 1 we show that sentences containing ambiguous pronouns are processed at the same speed as those containing unambiguous pronouns under shallow processing, but more slowly under deep processing. We outline three possible models to account for the shallow processing of ambiguous pronouns. Two involve an initial commitment followed by possible revision, and the other involves a delay in interpretation. In Experiment 2 we provide evidence that supports the delayed model of ambiguous pronoun resolution under shallow processing. We found no evidence to support a processing system that makes an initial commitment to an interpretation of the pronoun when it is encountered. We extend the account of pronoun resolution proposed by Rigalleau, Caplan, and Baudiffier (2004) to include the treatment of ambiguous pronouns under shallow processing.     

Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns

Earlier research has established that speakers usually fixate the objects they name and that the viewing time for an object depends on the time necessary for object recognition and for the retrieval of its name. In three experiments, speakers produced pronouns and noun phrases to refer to new objects and to objects already known. Speakers looked less frequently and for shorter periods at the objects to be named when they had very recently seen or heard of these objects than when the objects were new. Looking rates were higher and viewing times longer in preparation of noun phrases than in preparation of pronouns. If it is assumed that there is a close relationship between eye gaze and visual attention, these results reveal (1) that speakers allocate less visual attention to given objects than to new ones and (2) that they allocate visual attention both less often and for shorter periods to objects they will refer to by a pronoun than to objects they will name in a full noun phrase. The experiments suggest that linguistic processing benefits, directly or indirectly, from allocation of visual attention to the referent object.     

Mothers' use of personal pronouns when talking with toddlers

The verbal interaction of 2-year-old children (N = 46; 16 girls, 30 boys) and their mothers was audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed for the use of personal pronouns, the total number of utterances, the child's mean length of utterance, and the mother's responsiveness to her child's utterances. Mothers' use of the personal pronoun we was significantly related to their children's performance on the Stanford-Binet at age 5 and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children at age 8. Mothers' use of we in social--vocal interchange, indicating a system for establishing a shared relationship with the child, was closely connected with their verbal responsiveness to their children. The total amount of maternal talking, the number of personal pronouns used by mothers, and their verbal responsiveness to their children were not related to mothers' social class or years of education.