Interpretation Of Pronouns Research Articles

Teasing Apart Explanations of a Developmental Delay in Binding: Experimental Evidence from the Comparison of SLI and Williams Syndrome

abstractThis study investigates the knowledge of binding in 21 English-speaking children with SLI, aged 6;08–16;05, compared to 21 children with WS, language- and age-matched, and 21 language-matched control children, aged 4–7;10. Our results demonstrate no difficulties in the interpretation of reflexive or personal pronouns in SLI, revealing an intact knowledge of reflexive binding, as well as spared pragmatic functioning. Children with WS, however, show difficulties with their interpretation of pronouns, accepting the local binding of a pronoun, indicating impaired pragmatics. Not surprisingly, our language-matched typical controls, aged 4–7;08 (M = 5;03), showed a classic pattern of the Apparent Delay of Principle B Effect (ADPBE). In view of reported pragmatic but not memory deficits in WS, we interpret our results as consistent with the pragmatic deficit explanation but not the memory deficit explanation of the ADPBE.

The pronoun interpretation problem in child Hungarian

In a number of languages, children have problems with the interpretation of pronouns if a potential local antecedent is present. There is an intensive debate on whether this effect is due to a delayed acquisition of Principle B, or it is the result of pragmatic or processing difficulties that children face in interpretation tasks. We conducted two experiments involving a picture-sentence verification task to investigate whether the Pronoun Interpretation Problem exists in Hungarian child language. We found that the Problem is present if the test sentences are given in isolation, but it disappears if a minimally coherent discourse is created. We argue that our results support the view that the binding principles are innate and do not need to be acquired, but children have problems with computing coreference options in certain contexts (Reinhart 2004; 2006; 2011). Coherent discourse allows children to accommodate pronouns with close to adult-like success because in this case they do not calculate local coreference possibilities for pronouns.

Grammatical roles, Coherence Relations, and the interpretation of pronouns in Chinese

This paper reports on an experimental study of the interpretation of pronouns in Chinese which provides additional support for the proposal in Yang et al. (1999, 2003) that the resolution of pronominal reference in Chinese is more influenced by syntactic information than often assumed in approaches to discourse anaphora in Chinese such as Li and Thompson (1979), Givon (1983), Chen (1986), Christensen (2000), and Pu (2011), where the interpretation of such elements is solely attributed to semantic, pragmatic, and discourse structure-related factors. The paper makes use of a series of sentence completion tasks, adapted from Kehler and Rohde (2013) for Chinese, to try to tease apart the often complex roles played by syntactic position, Coherence Relations, and discourse structure.

Object-Clitic Agreement in Croatian: An ERP Study*

The present experiment was designed to open a discussion on the processing of anaphoric clitics in Croatian. The aim of the experiment was to examine the role of long-distance anaphoric relations and local structural case constraints during pronoun interpretation. On-line processing of cliticized direct-object pronouns embedded in a sentence context was examined using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Pronominal clitics were either morphologically correct or incorrect. Incorrect pronoun forms contained a gender violation, a case violation, or a violation of both gender and case. Electrophysiological response to each of the violation types was measured at the clitic site and at the sentence-final word and compared to activity in the control condition. The results indicate that, as attested in previous studies in other languages, there are functional and temporal differences between the processing of gender and case violations in pronouns. Whereas gender violations elicit late positivity, i.e., the component related to the processing of syntactic difficulties, case violations elicit a biphasic response in the form of early negativity followed by late positivity. A similar ERP effect is observed with double violations as well, albeit with a different distribution of the early negativity. The appearance of early negativities with case violations confirms previous findings on the rapidity of local syntactic processing as compared to the processing of long-distance anaphoric dependencies. At the end of the sentence, the typical wrap-up effect that reflects final semantic integration is replaced by the component related to syntactic reanalysis and repair.

The time course of long-distance anaphor processing in Korean

While early studies on the Korean long distance anaphor caki describe it to be subject-oriented in that it can only take subject antecedents, similarly to long distance anaphors in many other languages, more recent studies observe that it can take non-subject antecedents as well, especially in the context of certain verbs. This paper presents a visual-world eye-tracking study that tested whether the antecedent potential of caki in an embedded subject position is a function of the matrix subject, the matrix verb, or both, and whether the subject and the verb effects constrain the interpretation of caki in the same way as null pronouns, a commonly used pronominal form in Korean. These questions were addressed through an investigation of how the subject effect and the verb effect were manifested in processing these pronouns. We found that when caki, but not null pronouns, was first processed, there were more fixations to the images representing the matrix subject than the images representing the matrix object regardless of the matrix verb. We further found that the proportions of fixations to the images in both caki and null trials changed after the processing of some sentential verbs. These findings demonstrate that while null pronoun interpretation is a function of the verb effect only, caki-interpretation is a function of both the subject and the verb effect, supporting a multiple-constraints approach to anaphor resolution.

Re-assembling objects: a new look at the L2 acquisition of pronominal clitics

We test the predictions of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) as applied to the L2 acquisition of French pronominal clitics by Anglophone learners, capitalizing on the fact that different semantic and morphosyntactic features are lexically encoded by French and English pronouns. A picture selection task and a self-paced reading task examine how the information encoded in the L2 forms affects off-line and on-line pronoun interpretation. Our findings suggest that the initial L1–L2 mapping was indeed influenced by the L1. Nevertheless, L2 learners successfully reassembled features into L2 bundles, as evidenced by target-like off-line performance. L2 reading time patterns, however, indicate that L1 representations may have a longer-lasting impact: learners’ reactions to the mismatching input followed a different pattern and were slightly delayed as compared to native speakers’. These results are in line with the FRH, which conceptualizes L1 influence as the transfer of atomic linguistic features and their combinations.

Topic shift impairs pronoun resolution during sentence comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials.

This study investigated how topic shift and topic continuation influence pronoun interpretation in Chinese. ERPs recorded on pronouns in topic structure showed stronger and earlier late positive responses (P600) for the topic-shift than for the topic-continuation conditions. However, in nontopic structure where the subject (denoting only subjecthood), rather than the topic (denoting both topichood and subjecthood), acted as the antecedent of the pronoun, almost indistinguishable P600 responses were obtained on the pronoun regardless of whether it was referring to the subject (i.e., subject continuation) or the object (i.e., subject shift). Moreover, stronger and earlier P600 responses were elicited by pronouns in the topic-shift than in the subject-shift conditions, although there was no difference between the topic-continuation and the subject-continuation conditions. These findings suggest that topic shift results in greater difficulty in the resolution stage of referential processing, although the bonding process is not sensitive to the manipulation of topic status, and that topic has a privileged cognitive status relative to other nontopic entities (e.g., subject) in real-time language processing.

한국인 EFL 성인 고급 학습자들의 담화 맥락에서의 대명사 이해

한국인 EFL 성인 고급 학습자들의 담화 맥락에서의 대명사 이해

NATIVE AND NONNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF PRONOMINAL FORMS

This study investigates the influence of grammatical role and discourse-level cues on the interpretation of different pronominal forms in native speakers of French, native speakers of Turkish, and Turkish learners of French. In written questionnaires, we found that native speakers of French were influenced by discourse-level cues when interpreting ambiguous overt subject pronouns in French, whereas native speakers of Turkish were mainly influenced by a syntactic cue—subjecthood—when interpreting null subjects (pro) in Turkish translation equivalents. When interpreting implicit subjects of nonfinite dependent clauses (PRO), native speakers of both French and Turkish were influenced by subjecthood. Finally, Turkish learners of French were influenced by discourse-level cues in the interpretation of overt pronouns as well as PRO and showed no subject preference in either case. These results are in line with approaches to second language (L2) acquisition that stress the role of discourse-level principles in the processing and use of a L2 (Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Klein & Perdue, 1997).

Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: Evidence from pronominal resolution

Several studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers’ grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of ‘arrested’ development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek–Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution.

The influence of information status on pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese: evidence from ERPs.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the modulation of pronoun resolution processes by the information status of the antecedent. Information status was manipulated by using a structurally based constraint (e.g., order of mention) as well as a pragmatically based constraint (i.e., topichood). We found that the pronouns referring to topic entities [the initial noun phrase (NP) in Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) structure in Experiment 1 and OSV structure in Experiment 2] elicited attenuated P600 responses compared to the pronouns referring to non-topic entities (the initial NP in SVO structure or the second NP in OSV structure in both experiments) when potential interference from structural constraints was controlled. The linear structural constraint, namely the order of mention, had no clear influence on the P600 effect when the syntactic structural constraint was held constant (i.e., when both entities were syntactic subjects), regardless of whether one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) animate antecedents were present. These findings suggest that pragmatically encoded features such as topichood and givenness can be processed separately from structural constraints such as order of mention to promote the salient status of a referent and thereby facilitate pronoun interpretation.

Perspective shift increases processing effort of pronouns: a comparison between direct and indirect speech

This study investigates the processing of deictic pronouns in two types of speech reports, direct speech (Elephant said: “I get the football”) and indirect speech (Elephant said that I get the football). According to Hypothesis 1, pronoun processing in direct speech is more demanding because it requires a perspective shift from the actual to the original speaker. Hypothesis 2 suggests the opposite, based on a previous study that found a positive effect of direct speech on discourse comprehension. In a referent selection task, 116 native speakers of Dutch identified the referents of first-, second- and third-person pronouns in direct and indirect speech. We found higher error rates and longer decision times for pronoun interpretation in direct speech, confirming Hypothesis 1. Furthermore, accuracy depended on the pronoun (most mistakes for he). We discuss how our results can be reconciled with seemingly conflicting evidence that suggests a processing advantage for direct speech.

Children mix direct and indirect speech: evidence from pronoun comprehension.

This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, "I get the football") and indirect speech (Elephant said that he gets the football), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we hypothesize that the direct-indirect distinction is acquired relatively late. We also predict more mistakes for third person pronouns compared to first and second person pronouns. We tested 136 Dutch-speaking children between four and twelve in a referent selection task and found that children interpret pronouns in direct speech predominantly as in indirect speech, supporting our hypothesis about a late acquisition of the direct-indirect distinction. In addition, we found differences between I, you, and he that deviate from a simple first and second vs. third person split. We discuss our results in the light of cross-linguistic findings of direct-indirect mixing.

L3 Initial State: Typological Primacy Driven, L2 Factor Determinded, or L1 Feature Oriented?

The present study investigates the interpretation of null subject and object pronouns in matrix and embedded clauses by twenty-five adult Chinese speakers of advanced L2 English acquiring L3 French in the initial stage and twenty-three participants of the same L1/L2 background acquiring L3 Spanish in the initial stage. It tests predictions made by three theories in L3 acquisition: the Typological Primacy Model of Rothman (2011), the L2 Status Factor of Bardel and Falk (2007) and Falk and Bardel (2011), and the Interpretability Hypothesis of Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007). Asymmetries displayed in learners' interpretation of null matrix subjects and null embedded subjects as well as in null matrix subjects and null matrix and embedded objects suggest not only subjects and objects but also matrix and embedded clauses are treated differently by L1 Chinese/L2 English speakers of L3 French and L3 Spanish. The observed behaviour can be explained following Kong (2005) that adult learners have no access to uninterpretable syntactic features.

The interpretation of the logophoric pronoun in Ewe

This paper presents novel data regarding the logophoric pronoun in Ewe. We show that, contrary to what had been assumed in the absence of the necessary fieldwork, Ewe logophors are not obligatorily interpreted de se. We discuss the prima facie rather surprising nature of this discovery given the assumptions that de se construals arise via binding of the pronoun by an abstraction operator in the left periphery of the clausal complement of an attitude predicate, and that logophors are elements that are obligatorily bound by such abstractors. We show that this approach can be reconciled with these facts given the additional assumption that elements that are ‘de se’ bound can interact with the concept generator variables posited by Percus and Sauerland (Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 7, 2003a; Proceedings of NELS 33, 2003b) to derive de re interpretations of embedded nominals. The proposed set-up has consequences for our understanding of puzzles raised by Heim and Sharvit concerning binding-theoretic effects with de re elements, and for the derivation of the obligatorily de se interpretation of controlled PRO.

Children's use of gesture in ambiguous pronoun interpretation.

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7-8 years of age) but not younger (4-5 years) children integrate co-referential gestures into their interpretation of pronouns. This is the same age at which they show sensitivity to order-of-mention, the only other cue available in the stimuli. Interestingly, when children show sensitivity to the gestures, they are quite similar to adults, in that gestures consistent with order-of-mention increase first-mentioned responses as compared to stimuli with no gestures, but only slightly, while gestures inconsistent with order-of-mention have a larger effect on interpretation, decreasing first-mentioned responses and increasing second-mentioned responses.

The causes and consequences explicit in verbs

Interpretation of a pronoun in one clause can be systematically affected by the verb in the previous clause. Compare Archibald angered Bartholomew because he … (he = Archibald) with Archibald criticised Bartholomew because he … (he = Bartholomew). While it is clear that meaning plays a critical role, it is unclear whether that meaning is directly encoded in the verb or, alternatively, inferred from world knowledge. We report evidence favouring the former account. We elicited pronoun biases for 502 verbs from seven Levin verb classes in two discourse contexts (implicit causality and implicit consequentiality), showing that in both contexts, verb class reliably predicts pronoun bias. These results confirm and extend recent findings about implicit causality and represent the first such study for implicit consequentiality. We discuss these findings in the context of recent work in semantics, and also develop a new, probabilistic generative account of pronoun interpretation.

Embedded finite complements, indexical shift, and binding in Tsez

This report documents grammatical patterns associated with Tsez finite clauses that combine with the quotative enclitic =ƛin. Based on the distributional properties of such finite clauses and their co-occurrence with different matrix verbs, I suggest that the marker =ƛin is structurally ambiguous between a genuine quotative marker, marking direct speech, and a complementizer, heading finite clauses. In the former function, =ƛin can be compared to English like, go or all. The quotative =ƛin does not impose restrictions on the word order of the embedded clause and is compatible with a large set of verbs, including but not limited to verbs of speaking, cognition, and propositional attitude predicates. As a complementizer heading finite clauses, the marker =ƛin appears on clauses that are strictly predicate-final and attaches directly to that predicate. When selected by propositional attitude verbs, the finite complement clause becomes the context in which the interpretation of pronouns can undergo indexical shift. The Tsez pattern of indexical shift is in many ways similar to patterns of indexical shift reported for other languages. However, the description of this pattern also adds a novel generalization to the growing body of knowledge about indexical shifts: in Tsez, the shifted interpretation is made obligatory if the embedded clause includes a long-distance reflexive. This usage is particularly striking given that the binder in the matrix clause and the bindee do not match in person.

Automation and Validation of Annotation for Hindi Anaphora Resolution

The process of labelling any language genre by which one can extract useful information is called annotation. This provides syntactic information about a word or a word phrase. In this paper, an effort has been made to provide the algorithm for semiautomatic annotation for Hindi text to cater anaphora resolution only. The study was conducted on twelve files of Ranchi Express available in EMILLE corpus. The corpus is originally tagged for demonstrative pronouns. The detection of the pronouns is supported by the incorporation of seven tags. However the semantic interpretation of the demonstrative pronoun is not supported in the original corpus. In this paper an effort has been made to automate the process of tagging as well as the handling of semantic information through addition tags. It was conducted on 1485 demonstrative pronouns. The average accuracy of precision, recall and F measure is 74, 71 and 72 respectively.

Women and Men Have Different Discourse Biases for Pronoun Interpretation

Two experiments examine how men and women interpret pronouns in discourse. Adults are known to show a strong “first-mention bias”: When two characters are mentioned (Michael played with William…), comprehenders tend to interpret subsequent pronouns as coreferential with the first of the two characters and to find pronouns more natural than names for reference to the first character. However, this bias is not absolute. Experiment 1 demonstrates a stronger first-mention bias for women than men in their naturalness ratings for short stories. Experiment 2 monitors eye movements during story comprehension and finds that women are more likely than men to consider the first-mentioned character as the pronoun referent. These findings reveal the first known gender difference in reference processing and reinforce the view that reference processing is driven by more than the discourse context alone.