Lorna Morrow

They're digging up the road again: The processing cost of Institutional They

It is commonplace to use the pronoun they to refer to agents in certain situations without ever providing a referent, as in On the train, they served really bad coffee. Such an example we call “Institutional They”, because such defaults typically represent the actions of some agent tied stereotypically to a situation. These cases represent an important subset of unheralded pronouns (Gerrig, 1986), pronouns without any explicit antecedent. While in many situations, the occurrence of referential pronouns without explicit antecedents entails a processing cost, an eye-tracking experiment revealed no reliable detectable costs associated with Institutional They. However, there were for singular pronouns without antecedents in the same situations. We argue that Institutional They cases result from properties of plural pronouns (they and them). These will accept underspecified type-referents, while singular pronouns require specified token-referents. Failure to identify token-referents results in disruption of processing in the case of singulars, but not in the case of the plurals.

Capturing the attention of readers? Stylistic and psychological perspectives on the use and effect of text fragmentation in narratives*

Abstract This article brings together researchers from Stylistics and Psychology to study whether text fragmentation, which appears often to be used by writers as a foregrounding device (Mukařovský 1964), is able to capture the attention of readers of narratives. We examine two types of text fragmentation: sentence fragments and mini-paragraphs. Firstly, we study the stylistic functions of fragmentation, including its cumulative use at plot crucial moments and its use for local rhetorical purposes. We then turn to psychological research on depth of processing (e.g. Sanford and Sturt 2002) and introduce a new method of testing, the text change detection method (Sturt at al. 2004). We report an experiment using this method to examine whether text fragments and very short sentences can increase the amount of detail that readers notice in a text, and then discuss the results in relation to potential applications. The work provides both a case study of the empirical analysis of foregrounding devices, and also, more generally, a case study of inter-disciplinary research across the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The representation of ontological category concepts as affected by healthy aging: Normative data and theoretical implications

Attributes associated with concept representations, such as familiarity, typicality, and age of acquisition, have been shown to be important influences on lexical-semantic processing. In most previous studies of healthy and pathological aging, these attributes are not equated for younger and older adults separately on the stimuli used. In this study, normative data were collected to test whether there exist any age differences in these attributes. The results demonstrate that the ratings given by younger and older adults on natural and manmade category items correlated positively. However, age differences were also apparent, whereby older adults provided higher ratings overall than younger adults. Suggestions and hypotheses are presented to explain this pattern of age differences, which relate to how category concepts may be represented by healthy younger and older adults. Also, the possible implications for these differential age ratings on lexical-semantic processing are discussed. The age differences apparent in this study demonstrate the need to consider age-appropriate normative ratings in the selection of stimuli for use in lexical-semantic processing studies of aging, and the normative data presented provide a means of equating category stimuli. The complete list of all the means is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Sentence Fragmentation: Stylistic Aspects

‘Sentence fragmentation’ is a term covering the use of linguistic expressions that are not grammatically full sentences but that are nevertheless punctuated as sentences. This article first summarizes the study of sentence fragmentation in written texts, including research in stylistics and psychology and the observations of grammar textbooks and punctuation guides. We then present a survey of 16 different types of sentence fragmentation found in our database of examples, mainly from narrative fiction. We then discuss the major stylistic functions of sentence fragmentation in literary texts. Finally, we present some suggestions for future linguistic and stylistic research on fragmentation.