Abstract
Successful natural language understanding requires that comprehenders be able to resolve uncertainty in language. One source of potential uncertainty emerges from a speaker’s choice to use a pronoun (e.g., he, she, they), since pronouns often do not fully specify the speaker’s intended referent. Nevertheless, comprehenders are typically able to interpret pronouns rapidly despite having limited cognitive resources. Here we report three pronoun interpretation experiments that investigate whether comprehenders reverse-engineer a speaker’s referential intentions based on Bayesian principles, as documented in previous studies for English. Using Mandarin Chinese, we test the generality of the Bayesian pronoun interpretation theory, and further evaluate the predictions of the theory in ways that are not possible in English. Our results lend both qualitative and quantitative support to a cross-linguistically general Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation.
Highlights
Ambiguity abounds in natural language, and yet comprehenders are typically able to recover the intended messages of their interlocutors
Since ba does not change the grammatical function of the argument it marks, there is a possible opportunity to reveal a potential influence of topichood on pronoun production biases, dissociated from grammatical function, as we describe in the logic below
The data revealed a dissociation between the factors that determine pronoun production and pronoun interpretation: interpretation biases do not straightforwardly mirror expectations about next-mention, nor do they mirror pronoun production biases
Summary
Ambiguity abounds in natural language, and yet comprehenders are typically able to recover the intended messages of their interlocutors. According to a commonly-held view, one that we take to have been implicitly assumed in much of the literature on pronominal reference for decades, there is a singular notion of entity SALIENCE or PROMINENCE that underlies pronoun usage In essence, on this theory, speakers use a pronoun when referring to a salient referent, and addressees will use the same cues to salience to successfully identify the referent. On this theory, speakers use a pronoun when referring to a salient referent, and addressees will use the same cues to salience to successfully identify the referent In their well-known theory relating referential form to cognitive status, Gundel et al [1] ask “What do speakers/writers know that enables them to choose an appropriate form to refer to a particular object and what do readers/ hearers know that enables them to identify correctly the intended referent of a particular form?”. They answer their question with a set of cognitive statuses that mediate between production
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