The interpretation of focused pronouns in Norwegian children and adults

Earlier research states that if an unaccented pronoun refers to the subject of the preceding sentence, a focally accented pronoun will refer to the object. In the current study, we tested whether Norwegian adults select the intended pronoun referent in this context. Our study is also the first one to use eye-tracking to investigate children's developing sensitivity to intonational cues in pronoun resolution, and consequently the first one where Norwegian is the object language. The participants were monolingual 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children, and a group of adults. They listened to the Norwegian version of utterances like ‘Sarai hugged Mariaj. Then shei/SHEj hugged her own teddy bear’, while watching two corresponding figures on a screen. This was followed by the question, in Norwegian, ‘Who hugged her own teddybear?’ When answering the question, the adults selected the subject referent (Sara) after unaccented pronouns, and the object referent (Maria) after focally accented pronouns. Eye-tracking data revealed that the 7-year-olds initially looked towards the object referent after hearing the pronoun, and then switched to look at the subject referent, regardless of the pronoun's intonation. The 5-year-olds answered the question by selecting the intended referent more often after a focally accented pronoun than after an unaccented one. Finally, the 3-year-olds showed no clear preferences. These results suggest that Norwegian children under the age of seven are still not adult-like when resolving accented and unaccented pronouns.

Download Full-text

Eye tracking and tourism research: A systematic literature review

Journal Of Vacation Marketing ◽

10.1177/13567667211053387 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 135676672110533

Author(s):

Georgiana-Denisse Savin ◽

Cristina Fleșeriu ◽

Larissa Batrancea

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Tracking Data ◽

Research Papers ◽

Research Directions ◽

Heat Maps ◽

Tourism Research ◽

Dynamic Stimuli ◽

Tracking Technique ◽

The Subject ◽

Practical Implications

In recent years, the number of studies in tourism using the eye tracking technique has increased and started generating valuable information for both academics and the industry. However, there is a gap in the literature concerning systematic reviews focused on recent articles and their findings. Thus, the aim of this study is to close this gap by systematically analysing 70 research papers tackling the subject of eye tracking in tourism and published in highly ranked tourism journals. The study identifies the most popular topics and trends for eye tracking research, as well as the most used types of visual stimuli, such as exhibitions, restaurant menus, promotional pictures or websites. The study also details on measurements specific for the analysis of eye tracking data, including fixations, saccades and heat maps. Results are emphasized along with their theoretical and practical implications. In addition, we highlight the lack of the use of dynamic stimuli in the existing literature and suggest further research directions using the eye tracking technique.

Download Full-text

Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

Psychological Science ◽

10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01525.x ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 16 (4) ◽

pp. 260-264 ◽

Cited By ~ 65

Author(s):

Juhani Järvikivi ◽

Roger P.G. van Gompel ◽

Jukka Hyönä ◽

Raymond Bertram

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Noun Phrase ◽

Cognitive Structure ◽

Visual World ◽

Pronoun Resolution ◽

Structure Building ◽

Grammatical Subject ◽

The Subject

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the preceding clause or sentence. Participants listened to sentences in either subject-verb-object or object-verb-subject order; each was followed by a sentence containing an ambiguous pronoun that referred to either the subject or the object. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they looked at pictures representing the two possible antecedents of each pronoun. Analyses of the fixations on the pictures showed that listeners used both order-of-mention and grammatical-role information to resolve ambiguous pronouns.

Download Full-text

The Opposition of Surprisal and Semantic Similarity in the Prediction of Language Processing: Evidence from Eye-tracking Data

10.31234/osf.io/zypk9 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Kun Sun

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Semantic Similarity ◽

Cognitive Processing ◽

Language Processing ◽

Language Comprehension ◽

Word Processing ◽

Reading Time ◽

Computational Models ◽

Tracking Data ◽

Dynamic Approach

Expectations or predictions about upcoming content play an important role during language comprehension and processing. One important aspect of recent studies of language comprehension and processing concerns the estimation of the upcoming words in a sentence or discourse. Many studies have used eye-tracking data to explore computational and cognitive models for contextual word predictions and word processing. Eye-tracking data has previously been widely explored with a view to investigating the factors that influence word prediction. However, these studies are problematic on several levels, including the stimuli, corpora, statistical tools they applied. Although various computational models have been proposed for simulating contextual word predictions, past studies usually preferred to use a single computational model. The disadvantage of this is that it often cannot give an adequate account of cognitive processing in language comprehension. To avoid these problems, this study draws upon a massive natural and coherent discourse as stimuli in collecting the data on reading time. This study trains two state-of-art computational models (surprisal and semantic (dis)similarity from word vectors by linear discriminative learning (LDL)), measuring knowledge of both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structure of language. We develop a `dynamic approach' to compute semantic (dis)similarity. It is the first time that these two computational models have been merged. Models are evaluated using advanced statistical methods. Meanwhile, in order to test the efficiency of our approach, one recently developed cosine method of computing semantic (dis)similarity based on word vectors data adopted is used to compare with our `dynamic' approach. The two computational and fixed-effect statistical models can be used to cross-verify the findings, thus ensuring that the result is reliable. All results support that surprisal and semantic similarity are opposed in the prediction of the reading time of words although both can make good predictions. Additionally, our `dynamic' approach performs better than the popular cosine method. The findings of this study are therefore of significance with regard to acquiring a better understanding how humans process words in a real-world context and how they make predictions in language cognition and processing.

Download Full-text