How Children Process Reduced Forms: A Computational Cognitive Modeling Approach to Pronoun Processing in Discourse.

Margreet Vogelzang,Hedderik Van Rijn,Petra Hendriks,Maria Teresa Guasti

doi:10.1111/cogs.12951

Abstract

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning "He/She/It runs") as referring to the most prominent referent in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, "He runs") as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian-speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded-rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research.

Highlights

When communicating, speakers tend to refer to entities or events in the world around them
The model accounts for the general patterns in the data: Unambiguous full noun phrases (NPs) are interpreted correctly, null pronouns often refer to the discourse topic, and overt pronouns vary in their interpretation but are mostly interpreted as referring to the non-topical referent
Without working memory (WM) aiding the identification of the discourse topic (Fig. A3 in the Appendix), null as well as overt pronouns are interpreted as a topic continuation only around 50% of the time

Summary

Introduction

Speakers tend to refer to entities or events in the world around them. To refer to a particular entity, speakers can often choose between various forms that differ in the amount of information they convey about their intended referent. Pronouns such as he provide little information about the intended referent compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. To determine the intended referent of a pronoun (i.e., its antecedent), listeners must use additional information such as context. Little is known about how linguistic and contextual factors interact with these cognitive limitations when listeners process pronouns

Methods

Results

Conclusion