Elsi Kaiser

Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the antecedent Finnish pronouns and demonstratives are most sensitive to, both in terms of their final interpretations and during real-time processing. In particular, the syntactic role and linear position of the antecedent, two factors which have been claimed to influence referent salience, have different effects on the interpretation of pronouns and demonstratives. Contrary to what is commonly assumed, pronouns and demonstratives cannot be mapped onto a unified salience hierarchy, because they exhibit different degrees of sensitivity to syntactic role and word order. We offer an alternative approach to anaphor resolution, the form-specific multiple-constraints approach.

Structural and semantic constraints on the resolution of pronouns and reflexives

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. Andrews picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives and how different kinds of information are integrated during real-time reference resolution. The results show that the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture NP constructions is sensitive not only to purely structural information, as is commonly assumed in syntactically-oriented theories of anaphor resolution, but also to semantic information (see Kuno, S. (1987). Functional syntax: Anaphora, discourse and empathy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Tenny, C. (2003). Short distance pronouns in representational noun phrases and a grammar of sentience. Ms.). Moreover, the results show that pronouns and reflexives differ in the degree of sensitivity they exhibit to different kinds of information. This finding indicates that the form-specific multiple-constraints approach (see Brown-Schmidt, S., Byron, D. K., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2005). Beyond salience: Interpretation of personal and demonstrative pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 292-313; Kaiser, E. (2003). The quest for a referent: A crosslinguistic look at reference resolution. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Kaiser, E. (2005). When salience is not enough: Pronouns, demonstratives and the quest for an antecedent. In: Laury, R. (Ed.), Minimal reference in Finnic: The use and interpretation of pronouns and zero in Finnish and Estonian discourse (pp. 135-162). Helsinki, Finland: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura; Kaiser, E., & Trueswell, J. (2008). Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(5), 709-748), which states that referential forms can exhibit asymmetrical sensitivities to the different constraints guiding reference resolution, also applies in the within-sentence domain.

Focusing on pronouns: Consequences of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus

We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related factors (subjecthood, givenness) interact with contrastive focus effects, and to investigate whether the seemingly mixed results obtained in prior work on topicality and focusing could be related to effects of subjecthood. Our results indicate that structural and semantic prominence (specifically, agentive subjects) influence pronoun interpretation even when separated from information-structural notions, and thus need to be taken into account when investigating topicality and focusing. We discuss how our results allow us to reconcile the distinct findings of prior studies. More generally, this research contributes to our understanding of how the language comprehension system integrates different kinds of information during real-time reference resolution.

Animacy effects in Chinese relative clause processing

Prior research on relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese has led to conflicting results regarding ease of processing subject-extracted RCs (SRCs) versus object-extracted RCs (ORCs) and has often used animacy configurations that are rare in corpora. Building on animacy patterns observed in a corpus, we used self-paced reading to explore how animacy influences real-time processing of Chinese RCs. Experiment 1 tested SRCs, and found marginal facilitation effects with animate heads (subjects) and inanimate objects. Experiment 2 tested ORCs and found significant facilitation effects with inanimate head (objects). Experiment 3 showed that when the subject is animate and the object inanimate, ORCs are as easy to process as SRCs, but when the subject is inanimate and the object is animate, SRCs are processed faster. Thus, the animacy of the head and the embedded noun must be taken into account when evaluating processing ease.

Information structure: linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches

Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody. The relevant categories of information include the way a word or its referent have been used in context, for example, whether a particular referent has been previously mentioned, and whether it plays a topical role in the current utterance or discourse. We first provide a broad review of linguistic phenomena that are sensitive to information structure. We then discuss several theoretical approaches to explaining information structure: information status as a part of the grammar; information status as a representation of the speakers and listeners knowledge of common ground and/or the knowledge state of other discourse participants; and the optimal systems approach. These disparate approaches reflect the fact that there is little consensus in the field about precisely which information status categories are relevant, or how they should be represented. We consider possibilities for future work to bring these lines of work together in explicit psycholinguistic models of how people encode information status and use it for language production and comprehension. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:403-413. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1234 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language.

Subject Preference, Head Animacy and Lexical Cues: A Corpus Study of Relative Clauses in Chinese

This research examines factors that influence the frequency and ease of processing of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese. We conduct a corpus study of RCs with transitive action verbs in the Chinese Treebank corpus 5.0 and investigate two factors that have been argued to influence processing ease: RC type and classifier position. Our corpus analyses show that subject-modifying RCs are more frequent than object-modifying RCs and that within each type, subject-gapped RCs are more frequent than object-gapped RCs (SS > SO > OS > OO), which fits with claims that Mandarin Chinese resembles English in preferring subject-gapped RCs in subject position. Building on Pu (2007), we discuss how these patterns relate to the animacy of the head noun. In addition to RC type, classifier position has also been claimed to influence ease of processing. Our corpus reveals an asymmetrical pattern of classifier distribution in subject-gapped and object-gapped RCs, which we hypothesize follows from two processing principles having to do with anticipatory processing and lexical access. Our results help shed light on some controversies in the research on Mandarin RC processing.

Effects of Contrast on Referential Form: Investigating the Distinction between Strong and Weak Pronouns.

To further our understanding of the nature of the form–function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long–short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient antecedents) and the contrast account (long pronouns refer to entities that are being mentioned contrastively). To test these claims, this study compared parallel corpora of Estonian and Finnish to see how Estonian long pronouns are realized in Finnish and what the grammatical role of the antecedent is. Building on Pajusalu (1997), this study also analyzed the referential properties of long pronouns from the perspective of alternative semantics (Rooth, 1992) and Jackendoffs (1972) and Bürings (2003) research on contrast. The corpus patterns support the contrast account, indicating that the long–short distinction cannot be straightforwardly reduced to referent salience. As a whole, these results fit with the form-specific multiple-constraints approach to reference resolution (Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008).

Processing (non)compositional expressions: mistakes and recovery.

Current models of idiom representation and processing differ with respect to the role of literal processing during the interpretation of idiomatic expressions. Word-like models (Bobrow & Bell, 1973; Swinney & Cutler, 1979) propose that idiomatic meaning can be accessed directly, whereas structural models (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Cutting & Bock, 1997; Sprenger, Levelt, & Kempen, 2006) propose that literal processing is crucial in the access of idiomatic meaning. We used a self-paced reading task to examine how contextual expectations influence real-time processing of phrasal verbs that are ambiguous between a literal and idiomatic sense (e.g., look up, turn in) and how comprehenders recover from expectations that are revealed to be incorrect. Our results suggest that when comprehenders expect a literal interpretation in a situation where the sentence turns out to be idiomatic, real-time processing is disrupted more than if comprehenders are expecting an idiomatic interpretation and the sentence turns out to be literal. We interpret our results in favor of models of idiom processing that propose obligatory literal processing (e.g., Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988; Cutting & Bock, 1997; Sprenger et al., 2006). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Exploring the lexical and acoustic consequences of referential predictability

Findings from various domains suggest that predictability is an important component of language processing. We report psycholinguistic research suggesting that predictability also influences referential processing, in the form of reduced acoustic durations for predictable referents. However, we do not find evidence that predictability directly influences likelihood of pronominalization, contrary to some prior claims. Instead, our data indicate that the use and interpretation of pronouns is influenced by thematic role, independently of which referent is most predictable, i.e., most likely to be mentioned next. We suggest that likelihood-of-mention is influenced by the mapping between syntactic and thematic roles. Our results highlight the benefits of exploring both lexical and acoustic aspects of referential production.

Salience and contrast effects in reference resolution: The interpretation of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms—in particular, “emphatic” strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns—cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single feature of the antecedent. The findings show that while the different preferences of demonstratives pronouns and nonemphatic personal pronouns correlate with the antecedents grammatical role, the distinction between strong/emphatic personal pronouns and weak personal pronouns cannot be satisfactorily explained by grammatical role. The results suggest that the strong form is sensitive to the presence of contrastive, switched topics. These findings indicate that the form-specific multiple-constraints approach (e.g., Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008) can be extended to the strong/weak distinction and contrast sensitivity. We also discuss the implications of these results for the nature of the form-function mapping in anaphoric paradigms from a Gricean perspective.