Linguistic experience affects pronoun interpretation

Abstract

Abstract We test the hypothesis that language experience influences the cognitive mechanisms used to interpret ambiguous pronouns like he or she, which require the context for interpretation. Pronoun interpretation is influenced by both the linguistic context (e.g., pronouns tend to corefer with the subject of the previous sentence) and social cues (e.g., gaze can signal the pronoun’s referent). We test whether pronoun comprehension biases are related to the individual’s linguistic exposure. We focus on written language experience as a metric of linguistic exposure, given that reading experience varies widely, and can be probed with the Author Recognition Task (ART). In three experiments, people with higher ART scores assigned pronouns to the grammatical subject more consistently. ART scores correlated with some skill measures, but pronoun comprehension was not explained by working memory, theory of mind, or socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that language exposure affects language comprehension at the discourse level.