Discourse Models, Pronoun Resolution, and the Implicit Causality of Verbs

Author(s):  
Gail McKoon ◽  
Steven B. Greene ◽  
Roger Ratcliff
2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juhani Järvikivi ◽  
Roger P. G. van Gompel ◽  
Jukka Hyönä

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
WEI CHENG ◽  
AMIT ALMOR

ABSTRACTWe report two sentence-completion experiments investigating how nonnative speakers use universal semantic and discourse information, which are implicit causality and consequentiality biases associated with psychological verbs, to resolve pronouns. The results indicate that intermediate-advanced and advanced Chinese-speaking English learners show weaker implicit causality and consequentiality biases than native English speakers in pronoun resolution. Instead, nonnative speakers exhibit a general subject or first-mention bias. These findings suggest that nonnative speakers do not use semantic and discourse information in comprehension as effectively as native speakers.


Author(s):  
Joshua K. Hartshorne ◽  
Yasutada Sudo ◽  
Miki Uruwashi

The referent of a nonreflexive pronoun depends on context, but the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. For instance, in causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (Sally frightens Mary because she … vs. Sally loves Mary because she …). Several theories claim that verbs with similar meanings across languages should show similar pronoun resolution effects, but these claims run contrary to recent analyses on which much of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is susceptible to cross-cultural variation, and in fact there is little data in the literature to decide the question one way or another. Analysis of data in eight languages representing four historically unrelated language families reveals consistent pronoun resolution biases for emotion verbs, suggesting that the information upon which implicit causality pronoun resolution biases are derived is stable across languages and cultures.


Author(s):  
Pirita Pyykkönen ◽  
Juhani Järvikivi

A visual world eye-tracking study investigated the activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. We showed that people infer the implicit causality of verbs as soon as they encounter such verbs in discourse, as is predicted by proponents of the immediate focusing account ( Greene & McKoon, 1995 ; Koornneef & Van Berkum, 2006 ; Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, & Nieuwland, 2007 ). Interestingly, we observed activation of implicit causality information even before people encountered the causal conjunction. However, while implicit causality information was persistent as the discourse unfolded, it did not have a privileged role as a focusing cue immediately at the ambiguous pronoun when people were resolving its antecedent. Instead, our study indicated that implicit causality does not affect all referents to the same extent, rather it interacts with other cues in the discourse, especially when one of the referents is already prominently in focus.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudha Rao ◽  
Allyson Ettinger ◽  
Hal Daumé III ◽  
Philip Resnik

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