Coherence and Coreference Revisited

Abstract

For more than three decades, research into the psycholinguistics of pronoun interpretation has argued that hearers use various interpretation 'preferences' or 'strategies' that are associated with specific linguistic properties of antecedent expressions. This focus is a departure from the type of approach outlined in Hobbs (1979), who argues that the mechanisms supporting pronoun interpretation are driven predominantly by semantics, world knowledge and inference, with particular attention to how these are used to establish the coherence of a discourse. On the basis of three new experimental studies, we evaluate a coherence-driven analysis with respect to four previously proposed interpretation biases-based on grammatical role parallelism, thematic roles, implicit causality, and subjecthood-and argue that the coherence-driven analysis can explain the underlying source of the biases and predict in what contexts evidence for each will surface. The results further suggest that pronoun interpretation is incrementally influenced by probabilistic expectations that hearers have regarding what coherence relations are likely to ensue, together with their expectations about what entities will be mentioned next, which, crucially, are conditioned on those coherence relations.

Effects of Reference Form on Frequency of Mentionand Rate of Pronominalization

“…However, the prediction about a higher rate of pronominalization for the marked referents is not met, as referents headed by this and so'n tend to be picked up by lexically more elaborated types of noun phrases. This latter finding underlines the necessity to dissociate between likelihood of pronominalization and referential persistence (confirmation of more recent studies conducted by Kehler et al 2008, Chiriacescu & von Heusinger 2010, Kaiser 2010. Overall, the findings of this paper cast new light on the notions of accessibility, activation or prominence operationalized in terms of referential persistence and likelihood of pronominalization as equally weighted factors.…”

Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

“…Speakers are more likely to mention goals than sources in sentence-continuation tasks (Kehler et al, 2008;Stevenson et al, 1994), and corpus analysis suggests that goals are more likely to be mentioned than sources (Arnold et al, 2000). In the materials we adopted for this task, goals were also rated as more likely to be mentioned .…”

“…When the following clause provides an explanation for the scaring event, the expected cause is more likely to be mentioned-that is, it is referentially predictable. Nevertheless, several studies have shown that speakers are no more likely to use pronouns to refer to the implicit cause than the other character, and instead speakers show a general preference to use pronouns for the subject character (Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010;Kehler et al, 2008). Given that acoustic reduction and pronoun use tend to occur in the similar discourse contexts (Ariel, 1990;Arnold, 2008;Gundel et al, 1993), these findings might predict that thematic role predictability would not affect acoustic reduction.…”

“…For example, in transfer sentences like those in (1), listeners tend to expect that the speaker will continue talking about the goal character (Iris), perhaps because it is expected that she will do something with the object she received. While it is possible to continue the story with a discussion of something that Kathryn did, statistically this pattern is less common (Arnold, 2001), and when research participants are asked to invent continuations to stories, they tend to continue with the goal (Kehler et al, 2008;Stevenson et al, 1994). That is, the goal is referentially more predictable.…”

“…This debate concerns a different dimension of referential form: The choice between pronouns and more explicit names or descriptions. Several researchers have argued that thematic roles do not affect pronoun use (Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010;Kehler et al, 2008;Kehler & Rohde, 2013;Rohde & Kehler, 2014;Stevenson et al, 1994). These studies primarily focus on causal situations, e.g., David scared Ana because …, or Ana feared David because …, where one argument (here, David) is considered to be the more likely cause of the scaring event.…”