Are Implicit Causality Pronoun Resolution Biases Consistent Across Languages and Cultures?

Abstract

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.

The causes and consequences explicit in verbs

“…Arnold 2001; Crinean and Garnham, 2006; Hartshorne, 2014; Hartshorne et al, 2013; Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013). This leaves open a deep question about re-mention biases that has received too little attention: How and why do listeners draw on semantic information to interpret pronouns in the first place?…”

“…Participants were told that some real words had been replaced with novel words (e.g., daxed ) in order to make the task more challenging; this manipulation was intended to ensure that sentence content after the pronoun could have little effect on pronoun interpretation ( cf Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013; Hartshorne, Sudo & Uruwashi, 2013). The use of randomly-chosen common names had a similar purpose.…”

From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality

“…Up to date, however, only one study systematically investigated IC cross-linguistically using the same set of verbs and employing the same methods across languages. Hartshorne et al (2013) elicited IC biases in English, Japanese, Mandarin and Russian emotion verbs and found them to be highly correlated across languages and cultures.…”

Judgments under emotioncy’s influence

“…It seems logical to test the robustness of findings through other measures for evaluating linguistic biases. Moreover, notwithstanding the cognitive universality of the way people mold their reasoning in interpersonal domain and universality of structures used in LCM (Brown & Fish 1983b;Ferstl et al 2011;Hartshorne et al 2013;Rudolph & Försterling 1997), one cannot be oblivious to the restrictions posed on the interpretation of these results from culture specific criteria, such as politeness rules. Therefore, other studies should be carried out to investigate the results in different cultures and with different languages to substantiate the findings of this study.…”

“…That is, the sentences included a DAV, an IAV, an SV, and an ADJ., respectively. It was revealed that these structures are universal and consistent across languages and cultures (Brown & Fish 1983b;Ferstl et al 2011;Hartshorne, Sudo, & Uruwashi 2013;Rudolph & Försterling 1997) since there are cognitive universals about how people shape their reasoning in interpersonal domain (Brown & Fish 1983b). Hence, the scale was prepared in respondents' mother tongue (Persian) to avoid comprehension problems.…”