Print exposure explains individual differences in using syntactic but not semantic cues for pronoun comprehension

Abstract

Comprehenders have been shown to use both syntactic and semantic cues to understand pronouns like he and she. In Ana threw the ball to Liz. She…, there is a syntactic bias to assign “she” to the previous subject (Ana), and a semantic bias to assign it to the goal referent (Liz). How do people learn these biases? We tested how sensitivity to these cues is modulated by linguistic experience, measured with an Author Recognition Task (Stanovich & West, 1989). In two experiments, we found both the subject and goal biases overall, but higher print exposure only predicted use of the subject bias, not the goal bias. Our results suggest that the subject bias, and not the goal bias, may be learned from exposure.