The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context.

Liam P Blything,Juhani Järvikivi,Anja Arnhold,Abigail G Toth

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.684639

Liam P Blything, Juhani Järvikivi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.684639

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Abstract

Using visual world eye-tracking, we examined whether adults (N = 58) and children (N = 37; 3;1–6;3) use linguistic focussing devices to help resolve ambiguous pronouns. Participants listened to English dialogues about potential referents of an ambiguous pronoun he. Four conditions provided prosodic focus marking to the grammatical subject or to the object, which were either additionally it-clefted or not. A reference condition focussed neither the subject nor object. Adult online data revealed that linguistic focussing via prosodic marking enhanced subject preference, and overrode it in the case of object focus, regardless of the presence of clefts. Children’s processing was also influenced by prosodic marking; however, their performance across conditions showed some differences from adults, as well as a complex interaction with both their memory and language skills. Offline interpretations showed no effects of focus in either group, suggesting that while multiple cues are processed, subjecthood and first mention dominate the final interpretation in cases of conflict.

Highlights

Treatment The raw gaze data was pre-processed in the VWPre package (Porretta et al, 2018).The time course window was set to 200 ms prior to the onset of the ambiguous pronoun, followed by a critical region of 2,200 ms
Fitting and Evaluation of Our Main Models We report a series of Generalised Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs; see van Rij et al, 2019a) fitted separately to the data for children and adults, using the package mgcv (Wood, 2017) in R (R Core Team, 2019)
In a visual world eye tracking study, we investigated whether adults and children use linguistic focussing devices, embedded within a felicitous discourse, to help resolve ambiguous personal subject pronouns

Summary

Introduction

It is widely assumed that adult pronoun interpretation is guided by complex interactions of multiple cues (Arnold et al, 2000; Arnold, 2001, 2010; Järvikivi et al, 2005; Kaiser and Trueswell, 2008; Schumacher et al, 2017). Studies with flexible word order languages, such as German and Finnish, have allowed for the partial disentangling of these different cues, given that in an OVS word order the firstmentioned entity is instead aligned to the object and typically the patient role These studies have shown that interpretative preferences appear most robust when grammatical role, order of mention, and semantic cues are aligned (SVO), but are significantly weakened when the cues are put into conflict (OVS), both for adults (Järvikivi et al, 2005; Kaiser and Trueswell, 2008; Schumacher et al, 2017) and even more clearly, for children (Blything et al, 2021). It has often been suggested that children differ from adults in terms of the ability to appropriately use (or suppress) multiple cues, which would hinder their ability to interpret the pronoun, though with a potential role for individual differences (Järvikivi et al, 2014; Hartshorne et al, 2015)

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