Individual Differences in Print Exposure Predict Use of Implicit Causality in Pronoun Comprehension and Referential Prediction.

Elyce Johnson,Jennifer E Arnold

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672109

Abstract

In three experiments, we measured individual patterns of pronoun comprehension (Experiments 1 and 2) and referential prediction (Experiment 3) in implicit causality (IC) contexts and compared these with a measure of participants’ print exposure (Author Recognition Task; ART). Across all three experiments, we found that ART interacted with verb bias, such that participants with higher scores demonstrated a stronger semantic bias, i.e., they tended to select the pronoun or predict the re-mention of the character that was congruent with an implicit cause interpretation. This suggests that print exposure changes the way language is processed at the discourse level, and in particular, that it is related to implicit cause sensitivity.

Highlights

How does experience with language influence language comprehension? There is extensive evidence that language experience affects lexical and syntactic processing
As in Experiment 1, we found that participants with higher Author Recognition Task (ART) scores exhibited a stronger implicit causality bias for pronoun comprehension compared with participants with lower ART scores
We found that individual performance on a print exposure task was correlated with individual differences in the pronoun task: participants with higher ART scores were more sensitive to the verb bias than participants with lower ART scores

Summary

Introduction

How does experience with language influence language comprehension? There is extensive evidence that language experience affects lexical and syntactic processing. This interpretation suggests comprehenders are making semantic inferences about who is more likely to be the cause of the fear event In this example, people tend to expect that the speaker will talk about some action of Will as an explanation of the fearing event, which influences the interpretation of the pronoun he (e.g., Kehler and Rohde, 2013). People tend to expect that the speaker will talk about some action of Will as an explanation of the fearing event, which influences the interpretation of the pronoun he (e.g., Kehler and Rohde, 2013) This “implicit causality” bias is only one of several constraints known to affect pronoun comprehension. This means that for any given pronoun, comprehenders must weigh different constraints to judge the speaker’s intended meaning

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