Interpretation Of Pronouns Research Articles

L1 transfer in the interpretation of L2 reflexive pronouns by child learners of Korean

Aim: The current study explores first language (L1) transfer in child second language (L2) acquisition, testing whether L1-Chinese children learning L2 Korean show an advantage over L1-Russian children in the acquisition of Korean reflexives. Methodology: L1-Chinese and L1-Russian children with L2 Korean completed truth-value judgment tasks designed to explore their interpretation of the Korean reflexives caki and caki-casin in bi-clausal sentences. Chinese, like Korean, has a monomorphemic reflexive that takes a long-distance (LD) antecedent, and a polymorphemic reflexive that prefers a local antecedent; Russian, in contrast, has only a monomorphemic reflexive, which requires a local interpretation in finite clauses. Data and analysis: The proportion of preferences for each condition in the tasks was statistically compared using a logistic mixed-effects regression. Findings: The study resulted in two main findings. First, L1-Chinese children, regardless of L2 proficiency, preferred the LD antecedent (i.e., the matrix clause subject) for caki and the local antecedent (i.e., the embedded clause subject) for caki-casin, which is target-like for Korean and consistent with the interpretation of the Chinese reflexives ziji and taziji. Second, high-proficiency (but not low-proficiency) L1-Russian children showed target-like behavior in rejecting an LD interpretation for caki-casin, but a non-target-like acceptance of the local interpretation for caki, which may be due to L1 transfer based on Russian’s locally bound reflexive. Originality: L1 transfer in the interpretation of L2 reflexive pronouns has been reported with adults, but not with children. The current study fills this research gap. Implications: This study provides evidence that supports L1 transfer in the context of child L2 reflexive interpretation, countering arguments claiming for a limited role of L1 transfer in child L2 acquisition.

ACQUIRING L2 PRONOUN INTERPRETATION BIASES

AbstractLearners of a nonnull subject language (e.g., English) whose first language (L1) is a null subject language (e.g., Spanish) can show some optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in the second language (L2). By exposing L2 learners to nativelike interpretations of pronouns in discourse, we aim at understanding how exposure can promote implicit learning of pronoun comprehension biases in a L2. A sentence comprehension task was used with intermediate-proficiency English L2 speakers (L1 Spanish) that included a pretest, an exposure phase using the priming technique, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest administered 6–10 days later. English learners showed a significant increase in nativelike pronoun interpretations both in the immediate posttest and in the delayed posttest, in comparison to the pretest. The results show that exposure through priming can be effective in changing L2 participants’ interpretations and that effects of exposure are persistent and may aid in the successful acquisition of pronoun resolution biases.

Children's Pronoun Interpretation Problems Are Related to Theory of Mind and Inhibition, But Not Working Memory.

In several languages, including English and Dutch, children’s acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., him) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.g., himself). Various syntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this delay in children’s acquisition of pronoun interpretation. This study aims to provide more insight into this delay by investigating potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this delay. Dutch-speaking children between 6 and 12 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 47), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 36) or typical development (TD; n = 38) were tested on their interpretation and production of object pronouns and reflexives and on theory of mind, working memory, and response inhibition. It was found that all three groups of children had difficulty with pronoun interpretation and that their performance on pronoun interpretation was associated with theory of mind and inhibition. These findings support an explanation of object pronoun interpretation in terms of perspective taking, according to which listeners need to consider the speaker’s perspective in order to block coreference between the object pronoun and the subject of the same sentence. Unlike what is predicted by alternative theoretical accounts, performance on pronoun interpretation was not associated with working memory, and the children made virtually no errors in their production of object pronouns. As the difficulties with pronoun interpretation were similar for children with ASD, children with ADHD and typically developing children, this suggests that certain types of perspective taking are unaffected in children with ASD and ADHD.

Interpretation of Korean Null Pronouns in subject and object position: Comparing native and non-native speakers

We report an experiment that investigates how native and non-native Korean speakers’ interpretation of null pronouns in subject and object position is influenced by structural and discourse-level factors. We compare native Korean speakers to L2 Korean learners whose L1, Spanish, only has null pronouns in subject position. We find that native Korean speakers’ interpretation of subject and object null pronouns is guided by structural factors as well as discourse-level coherence relations, with subject nulls being more sensitive to coherence relations than object nulls. In contrast, our results suggest that L2 speakers’ interpretation of null pronouns in Korean is less influenced by coherence relations. Our results support claims that interface phenomena are challenging in L2 acquisition and provide new evidence that this occurs with null pronouns in L2 even when the L1 has null pronouns.

How Children Process Reduced Forms: A Computational Cognitive Modeling Approach to Pronoun Processing in Discourse.

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning "He/She/It runs") as referring to the most prominent referent in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, "He runs") as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian-speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded-rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research.

Processing pronouns in global discourse context

This study examined the interpretation and processing of third-person pronouns when global discourse context supports a less-salient referent as antecedent of a subject pronoun. In particular, we investigated whether such information cancels a default generalized conversational implicature (GCI) biasing a local subject antecedent interpretation for an English overt pronoun. Eye-tracking data was recorded as participants heard four-sentence mini-stories with one of three Contexts: one biasing the subject of the previous clause as antecedent (SB), one biasing another human referent (OB), and one neutral to biasing either referent. Results showed that looking patterns did not diverge in OB and Neutral conditions until after crucial information tying into the larger discourse context was given in the post-pronoun verb. Strong preferences for non-subject referents did not emerge until after the sentence ended, a time-course consistent with participants calculating and then cancelling a default implicature for a subject antecedent. Meanwhile, discourse context reinforcing the default subject implicature in the SB condition facilitated processing, in terms of less time spent looking at either human referent compared the Neutral condition. Overall, results suggest that upon hearing an overt pronoun, English speakers first calculate a GCI that results in a local subject antecedent interpretation, but that, like all implicatures, this GCI can be defeated by contextual factors.

Shifty behavior: Investigating predicates of personal taste and perspectival anaphors

Many expressions in language are perspective-sensitive, including predicates of personal taste and some anaphoric forms. This paper reports experiments testing sentences like Nora told/heard from Amy about the frightening photograph of her/herself, with two perspective-sensitive elements, to see whether and how identification of the judge of predicates of personal taste relates to identification of the antecedent of pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs. This allows to us test if they follow a shift-together constraint requiring them to be interpreted relative to the same perspectival center. Our results corroborate earlier findings on the source/perceiver biases of reflexives and pronouns, and reveal a strong preference to interpret the individual who is the source of information as the judge, but do not provide clear evidence for a shift-together constraint on the interpretation of PPTs and pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs.

A Comparative Study of Linguistic and Computational Features Based on a Machine Learning for Arabic Anaphora Resolution

Anaphora resolution is one of the problems in natural language processing. It is the process of disambiguating the antecedent of a referring expression from the set of entities in a discourse. The correct interpretation of pronouns plays an important role in the construction of meaning. Thus, the resolution of pronominal anaphors remains a very important task for many natural language processing applications. Additionally, it plays an increasingly significant role in computational linguistics. However, a significant amount of work on anaphora resolution is focused on English; anaphora resolution for other languages, including Arabic, is still limited. In this paper, we present a new set of computational and linguistic features to resolve Arabic anaphors using a machine learning approach. In this paper, an in-depth study was conducted on a set of computational and linguistic features to exploit their effectiveness and investigate their effect on anaphora resolution. The aim was to efficiently integrate different feature sets and classification algorithms to synthesize a more accurate classification procedure. Four well-known machine learning algorithms k-nearest neighbor, maximum entropy, decision tree and meta-classifier, were employed as base-classifiers for each of the feature sets. A wide range of comparative experiments on Quran datasets was conducted, the discussion presented, and conclusions were drawn. The experimental results show that our approach gives satisfactory results.

Gesture Influences Resolution of Ambiguous Statements of Neutral and Moral Preferences.

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, comprehenders use both multimodal cues (e.g., gestures) and linguistic cues to identify the antecedent. While research has shown that gestures facilitate language comprehension, improve reference tracking, and influence the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, literature on reference resolution suggests that a wide set of linguistic constraints influences the successful resolution of ambiguous pronouns and that linguistic cues are more powerful than some multimodal cues. To address the outstanding question of the importance of gesture as a cue in reference resolution relative to cues in the speech signal, we have previously investigated the comprehension of contrastive gestures that indexed abstract referents – in this case expressions of personal preference – and found that such gestures did facilitate the resolution of ambiguous statements of preference. In this study, we extend this work to investigate whether the effect of gesture on resolution is diminished when the gesture indexes a statement that is less likely to be interpreted as the correct referent. Participants watched videos in which a speaker contrasted two ideas that were either neutral (e.g., whether to take the train to a ballgame or drive) or moral (e.g., human cloning is (un)acceptable). A gesture to the left or right side co-occurred with speech expressing each position. In gesture-disambiguating trials, an ambiguous phrase (e.g., I agree with that, where that is ambiguous) was accompanied by a gesture to one side or the other. In gesture non-disambiguating trials, no third gesture occurred with the ambiguous phrase. Participants were more likely to choose the idea accompanied by gesture as the stimulus speaker’s preference. We found no effect of scenario type. Regardless of whether the linguistic cue expressed a view that was morally charged or neutral, observers used gesture to understand the speaker’s opinion. This finding contributes to our understanding of the strength and range of cues, both linguistic and multimodal, that listeners use to resolve ambiguous references.

Interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in adults with intellectual disabilities.

Pronouns are referentially ambiguous (e.g. she could refer to any female), yet they are common in everyday conversations. Individuals with typical development (TD) employ several strategies to avoid pronoun interpretation errors, including the subject bias - an assumption that a pronoun typically refers to the subject (or, with the closely related order-of-mention bias, the first-mentioned character) of the previous sentence. However, it is unknown if adults with intellectual disability (ID) share this strategy or the extent to which the subject bias is associated with non-verbal abilities or receptive vocabulary. We tested 22 adults with mixed-aetiology ID on their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm and by asking a follow-up pronoun interpretation question. A group of TD adults was also tested to establish the strength of the subject bias with our materials and task. Adults with ID did demonstrate the subject bias, but it was significantly less robust than that seen in TD. For participants with ID, the subject bias was influenced by non-verbal IQ and receptive vocabulary at different stages of processing. Given the frequency of pronouns in conversation, strengthening the subject bias may help alleviate discourse and reading comprehension challenges for individuals with ID, particularly those with lower non-verbal and/or vocabulary skills.

Interpreting Estonian Demonstratives: The Effects of Referent's Distance and Visual Salience.

Most of the research done with spatial demonstratives (words such as this, here and that, there) have focused on the production, not the interpretation, of these words. In addition, emphasis has been largely on demonstrative pronouns, leaving demonstrative adverbs with relatively little research attention. The present study explores the interpretation of both demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative adverbs in Estonian—a Finno-Ugric language with two dialectal-specific demonstrative pronoun systems. In the South-Estonian (SE) dialectal region, two demonstrative pronouns, see—“this” and too—“that”, are used. In the North-Estonian (NE) region, only one, see—“this/that”, is used. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we test if the distance and the visual salience of a referent have an effect on the interpretation of demonstratives. Second, we explore if there is a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between native speakers from SE and NE. We used an interpretation experiment with 30 participants per group (total n = 60) and compared the SE and NE group responses. The results clearly show that the distance of the referent has an effect on how demonstratives are interpreted across the two groups, while the effect of visual salience is inconclusive. There is also a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between the two dialectal groups. When using the Estonian with an influence of the SE dialect, the NE speakers rely on demonstrative adverbs in interpreting the referential utterance that includes demonstrative pronoun and adverb combinations, whereas the SE speakers also take into account the semantics of demonstrative pronouns. We show that, in addition to an already known difference in the production, there is also a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between the two groups. In addition, our findings support the recognition that languages that have distance neutral demonstrative pronouns enforce the spatial meaning of a referring utterance by adding demonstrative adverbs. Not only is the interpretation of demonstrative pronouns affected, but the interpretation of demonstrative adverbs as well. The latter shows the importance of studying adverbs also, not just pronouns, and contributes to further knowledge of how demonstratives function.

When Couches Have Eyes: The Effect of Visual Context on Children's Reference Processing

We examined the effects of semantic and visual cues of animacy on children’s and adults’ interpretation of ambiguous pronouns, using the visual world paradigm. Participants listened to sentences with object relative clauses that varied the animacy of potential referents, followed by test sentences beginning with a referentially ambiguous subject pronoun he. Participants viewed images of the referents, with semantically inanimate objects (e.g., a TV) shown with or without added facial features. Results from offline verbal report and online gaze data revealed consistent effects of both semantic animacy and visual context on pronoun resolution in both groups: There was a preference for semantically animate referents as antecedent, but this preference decreased or disappeared when semantically inanimate referents had facial features. The results indicate that the use of animacy as a linguistic cue is flexible and responsive to the visual context. They further suggest that like adults (Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2006), 4-year-olds already use fictional, here visual, context to adjust their online and offline language comprehension preferences.

Children's interpretation of ambiguous pronouns based on prior discourse

In conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history (common ground). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2- to 5-year-old American English-speaking children's (N=131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. In a tablet-based game, children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3- and 4-year-olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun "it" as referring to another member of the same category. In Study 2, only 4-year-olds interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between ages 2 and 5.

Pronoun Processing and Interpretation by L2 Learners of Italian: Perspectives from Cognitive Modelling

How do second language learners acquire form-meaning associations in the second language that are inconsistent with their first language? In this study, we focus on subject pronouns in Italian and Dutch. A native speaker of the non-null subject language Dutch learning the null subject language Italian as a second language will not only have to learn to use and comprehend null pronouns, but will also have to learn to use and comprehend overt pronouns differently in the L2 than in the L1. The interpretation of Italian overt pronouns, but not of Dutch overt pronouns or Italian null pronouns, has been argued to require perspective taking, specifically the use of hypotheses about the conversational partner’s communicative choices to guide one’s own choices. Therefore, a related question is how perspective taking and cognitive constraints influence L2 acquisition of such forms. Using computational cognitive modelling, this study explores two learning scenarios. In cognitive model 1, second language acquisition proceeds in the same way as first language acquisition and is based on the same grammar. In cognitive model 2, second language acquisition differs from first language acquisition and involves the construction of a partly different grammar. Our results suggest that the second scenario may be cognitively more plausible than the first one. Furthermore, our models explain why second language learners of Italian perform less native-like on overt pronouns than on null pronouns.

Comprehending reflexive and clitic constructions in children with autism spectrum disorder and developmental language disorder.

It has been established that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties understanding spoken language. Understanding reflexive and clitic pronouns is vital to establishing reference-based inference, but it is as yet unclear whether such constructions pose specific difficulties for those with ASD. Pronoun interpretation seems be connected to the development of pragmatic abilities, and can therefore be considered a plausible marker in the differential diagnosis between ASD and developmental language disorder (DLD). To establish whether or not there are differences between ASD and DLD in relation to their understanding of pronoun constructions (both reflexive and clitic). The working hypothesis was that although no differences were expected between groups in relation to automatic (online) pronoun processing, the comprehension of reflexive pronouns would constitute a diagnostic marker between the group with ASD and language disorder and the DLD group. The study carried out two experiments with three clinical groups (two with ASD and different levels of language proficiency and one with DLD) and two control groups with typically developing people (with equivalent language levels), analysing their on- and offline processing in pronoun resolution tasks. The first experiment uses an online method (eye-tracking) to record pronoun processing in real time. The second uses an offline method to analyse comprehension accuracy. The results of the two experiments indicated no differences in the way in which the clinical and control groups resolved the tasks, but a shorter reaction time was observed only in the age-matched control group in comparison with the ASD group without language disorder in the first experiment, perhaps due to the fact that processing pronouns involves a greater cognitive load among the latter group. The comprehension of reflexive pronouns cannot be considered a diagnostic marker for distinguishing ASD from DLD. What this paper adds What is already known on the subject Previous studies have found that the performance of children with ASD in the comprehension of personal pronouns is equivalent to youngest control groups, but poorer regarding the interpretation of reflective pronouns. However, children with DLD do not usually have problems with the use of pronouns, which suggests that their pronoun processing is not affected. As pronoun interpretation seems be connected to the development of pragmatic abilities, it could be considered a plausible marker in the differential diagnosis between ASD and DLD. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This paper presents the results of two experiments involving pronoun processing by those with ASD (both with and without language disorder) and those with DLD. The design enables us to analyse the reflexive and clitic pronoun processing in people with ASD and DLD, regardless of their language proficiency. One experiment uses an eye-tracking methodology that allows us to obtain data about how the pronouns are processed in real time. It represents an attempt to identify language markers that may help distinguish between the two groups and adapt the interventions to the specific problems experienced by each one. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? The results indicate that it is not possible to identify any specific impairment in pronoun processing among the clinical groups (ASD and DLD).

Pronoun interpretation in Mandarin Chinese follows principles of Bayesian inference.

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.

Structural and Contextual Cues in Third-Person Pronoun Interpretation by Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Neurotypical Peers.

This study investigates the use of structural and discourse contextual cues in the interpretation of third-person pronouns by children and adolescents with autism and their neurotypical peers. Results show that referent-biasing contextual information influences pronominal interpretation and modulates looking patterns in both groups compared to a context-neutral condition. These results go against the predictions of Weak Central Coherence and the notion that pragmatics in general is impaired in ASD, since the ASD group was able to use details in discourse context to influence the pronominal interpretation process. However, although discourse context influenced looking patterns in both groups, the groups nevertheless diverged in the nature of these patterns, suggesting that behavioral differences may emerge in more complicated discourse tasks.

Effects of discourse factors on the interpretation of Korean null pronouns in subject and object position

The present study investigates whether interpretation of null pronouns in Korean is best captured by a heuristics-based approach, focusing on subjecthood and syntactic parallelism, or a discourse-based coherence-relation approach, which regards pronoun resolution as a side-effect of general inferencing processes during discourse comprehension. We report two experiments where we investigated whether and how the interpretation of null pronouns in subject and object position in Korean is influenced by (i) the nature of the connective between the preceding clause and the pronoun-containing clause (kuliko “and” or waynyahamyen “because”), (ii) the presence/absence of the additive marker -to “also” in the pronoun-containing clause, and (iii) the presence/absence of the topic marker -(n)un on the subject of the preceding clause. As a whole, our results support the coherence-relation approach. We find that when a cue indicating a resemblance relation (either the connective and or the additive marker also) is present, null pronouns in both subject and object position tend to be interpreted as referring to an antecedent in a parallel syntactic position (subject and object respectively). This parallelism bias strengthens when a resemblance relation is signaled by both and and also. In contrast, when the two clauses are linked with because (indicating an explanation relation), null pronouns show no significant preference for either the subject or object antecedent. Topic-marking has no effect, possibly due to lack of context. Our study provides new evidence that both subject- and object-position null pronouns are sensitive to both syntactic and discourse-level factors.

Implicit Gender Bias in Linguistic Descriptions for Expected Events: The Cases of the 2016 United States and 2017 United Kingdom Elections

Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants’ beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test.

Philosophy and Linguistics

This paper is an overview of the contemporary discussions in interdisciplinary studies of meaning of natural language expressions. The paper discusses the latest work published in two interdisciplinary journals «Linguistics and Philosophy» and «Natural Language Semantics» most relevant for philosophy of language. The paper focuses on two general topics: the semantics of singular terms (proper names, pronouns, demonstratives) and the semantics of belief-reports. The paper discusses the recent proposal about the interpretation of pronouns by [Stojnic et al., 2019] according to which such interpretation is strictly determined by the linguistic rules and does not depend on the context. According to this proposal, the referent of a pronoun is determined by a specific coherence relationship the sentence it occurs in has to the previous sentence in a discourse unless it is preceded by a pointing gesture. The paper discuses some issues with this proposal. Specifically, it discusses its difficulties with explaining the cases where the referent of a pronoun stands out in a context and, thus, no pointing gesture or previous discourse is required for the referent identification. It also discusses cases where a coherence relationship (such as Narration) between two sentences allows flexibility with respect to the referent identification and points at pragmatic factors that can be relevant in this respect. The paper also presents some other recent research on proper names, demonstratives and pronouns both linguistically and philosophically oriented.The paper also presents informally some work on belief-reports in linguistics and discussed its relevance for philosophy of language. It discusses the recent work on restrictions on the types of embeddings of propositional attitude verbs and the general approach that derives those restrictions from the predicted meanings of the relevant sentences, such as [Theiler et al., 2019]. The paper discussed the relevance of this issue to a more general question about the nature of a natural language and the relationship between language and logic.