Parallel function strategy in pronoun assignment

Subjects completed sentences of the form NP1 aux V NP2 because (but) Pro … (e.g., John may scold Bill because he …) with a reason or motive for the action described. A basic perceptual strategy was hypothesized to underlie the comprehension of these sentences which have a potentially ambiguous pronoun in the subject position of the subordinate clause. It was expected that listeners would interpret the pronoun as being coreferential with the subject NP of the main clause, the NP with the same grammatical function. While this strategy accounted for the major share of the results, semantic factors restricted its use, establishing an interpretation in which the pronoun was coreferential with the object NP of the main clause.     

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.     

Professional cricketers' perceptions of the importance of antecedents influencing repeatable good performance

This study examined whether there is overall agreement amongst professional cricketers on the factors which are most important for the occurrence of repeatable good performances in the sport. Also, the consistency of the rank-order of such variables was investigated across individuals and roles within the same sport. A total of 198 cricketers (100 batters and 98 bowlers) who play or have played first class cricket in the English County Championship completed a rank-order task, which enabled them to use their experiences to judge the importance of 15 selected performance-influencing variables. Cultural consensus analysis indicated that no one factor for either batters or bowlers was significantly more important, despite many batters and bowlers ranking the need for 'total self-confidence' highest. Whilst no over-all agreement was found for batters and bowlers in their ranking of variables, a group of similar 'core elements', e.g., total self-confidence, following a set prematch routine, set performance plans, optimal arousal, and using mental rehearsal, were highly ranked by both groups, which may be an important consideration for practitioners endeavoring to produce strategies that encourage more consistent and higher performance for cricketers.     

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.     

Factors influencing child witnesses

This study elucidates how professional intervention can influence children's abilities to report accurately about abuse experiences. Based on knowledge acquired through previous research and the present case study, the study shows how methods of information acquisition used during preliminary investigations can negatively affect child reports. The case study emanates from a larger study of 193 allegedly sexually abused children. Examination of these police interviews shows that 55 children were interviewed more than once and their reports were exposed to possible professional influences before and during the preliminary investigation. The case study reveals the inadequate management of a child witness. The findings indicate that police officers and psychologists should avoid suggestive interventions and co-ordinate their efforts during the preliminary investigation in order to safeguard the children's as well as the suspects' legal interests. This paper points out the need for implementing interview interventions that can enhance children's abilities to report accurately about abuse experiences.     

Factors influencing perceived angular velocity

The assumption that humans are able to perceive and process-angular kinematics is critical to many structure-from-motion and optical flow models. The current studies investigate this sensitivity, and examine several factors likely to influence angular velocity perception. In particular, three factors are considered: (1) the extent to which perceived angular velocity is determined by edge transitions of surface elements, (2) the extent to which angular velocity estimates are influenced by instantaneous linear velocities of surface elements, and (3) whether element-velocity effects are related to three-dimensional (3-D) tangential velocities or to two-dimensional (2-D) image velocities. Edge-transition rate biased angular velocity estimates only when edges were highly salient. Element velocities influenced perceived angular velocity; this bias was related to 2-D image velocity rather than 3-D tangential velocity. Despite these biases, however, judgments were most strongly determined by the true angular velocity. Sensitivity to this higher order motion parameter was surprisingly good, for rotations both in depth (y-axis) and parallel to the line of sight (z-axis).     

Factors influencing the desire for children

187 college students (139 women; 175 between the ages of 18 to 25 years) were asked to report how many children they desired. Participants' desire for children was unrelated to skin color, socioeconomic status, and the need for postbaccalaureate education. Conversely, sex, value orientation, and religious orientation were significantly associated with a desire for children.     

Factors influencing perceived angular velocity.

The assumption that humans are able to perceive and process angular kinematics is critical to many structure-from-motion and optical flow models. The current studies investigate this sensitivity, and examine several factors likely to influence angular velocity perception. In particular, three factors are considered: (1) the extent to which perceived angular velocity is determined by edge transitions of surface elements, (2) the extent to which angular velocity estimates are influenced by instantaneous linear velocities of surface elements, and (3) whether element-velocity effects are related to three-dimensional (3-D) tangential velocities or to two-dimensional (2-D) image velocities. Edge-transition rate biased angular velocity estimates only when edges were highly salient. Element velocities influenced perceived angular velocity; this bias was related to 2-D image velocity rather than 3-D tangential velocity. Despite these biases, however, judgments were most strongly determined by the true angular velocity. Sensitivity to this higher order motion parameter was surprisingly good, for rotations both in depth (y-axis) and parallel to the line of sight (z-axis).     

Factors influencing evaluations of web site information

This study investigated the effect of first-person and third-person perceptions of web site information. Responses from a telephone survey of 226 participants in a stratified random sample indicated that (1) most participants had higher evaluations for television news than for news received on the Internet; (2) a third-person effect was present in that most respondents generally thought that other people found the Internet easier to use than they did, and that other people were more likely to believe Internet information and trust the sources of Internet information than they would. Also, (3), evaluations of information on a particular web site could be increased by providing links to other web sites on the same topic. Perhaps links to other web sites may serve as either a "referencing" function or a social confirmation function to increase evaluations of web site information.     

Rules of engagement: incomplete and complete pronoun resolution

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In this paper we revisit those findings. In 11 recognition probe, priming, and self-report experiments, we manipulated Greene et al.'s stories to discover under what circumstances a pronoun's referent is automatically understood. We lengthened the stories from 4 to 8 lines. This simple manipulation led to automatic and correct resolution, which we attribute to readers' increased engagement with the stories. We found evidence of resolution even when the additional text did not mention the pronoun's referent. In addition, our results suggest that the pronoun temporarily boosts the referent's accessibility, an advantage that disappears by the end of the next sentence. Finally, we present evidence from memory experiments that supports complete pronoun resolution for the longer but not the shorter stories.     

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.     

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.     

Factors influencing readability of rapidly presented text segments

Experiment 1 compared paragraph comprehension for texts shown either as normal pages on a computer terminal screen or as rapid serial visual presentations (RSVPs) of small text segments to a common location. Over several days of practice, reading comprehension was equivalent in the normal presentation mode and the RSVP format. When successive RSVP segments contained some information in common, to mimic the experience of successive parafoveal and foveal views of words in normal reading, comprehension was somewhat worse than when successive segments contained no overlapping information. Experiment 2 used a variety of segment size and segment duration combinations to investigate the optimal means of presenting text in the RSVP format. Across a variety of presentation rates and text difficulties, comprehension was maximal for segments averaging about 12 character spaces in length. In Experiment 3, texts were divided into short idea units or into random segments of equal average length. Comprehension was shown to be greater in the structured condition than in the random condition. An optimal means of presenting text in the RSVP format could be superior to normal presentation methods for reading and other text-processing tasks.