Discourse coherence and pronoun resolution

Abstract

This paper used self-paced reading to test processing preferences in pronoun interpretation in English two clause sentences. The results demonstrate that people's preferences can be reversed by changing the coherence relation between the clauses. The results are not compatible with the existence of a single all-purpose strategy in pronoun resolution. Rather, the results support Kehler's (2002) hypothesis that the processing patterns observed in pronoun processing are a byproduct of more general cognitive inference processes underlying the establishment of coherence, such that discourse coherence guides pronoun reference, and pronoun reference guides discourse coherence.

The emergentist program

“…As noted by Kehler (2002) and Wolf et al (2004), listeners interpret the pronouns in such sentences in a way that makes the discourse coherent. Hence they is taken to refer to the demonstrators in (16a) but to the city council in (16b), consistent with general assumptions about groups that might advocate or fear violence.…”

Coherence and Coreference Revisited

“…With possible antecedents as the subject and object of the first clause, we are able to test the full 2 3 2 configurations of possible coreference patterns. As in Wolf et al (2004), passages participating in Result relationships semantically favoured the non-parallel referent, whereas those participating in Parallel relations incorporated no semantic bias. The modified grammatical subject preference can thus be evaluated by analysing the Parallel condition only.…”

“…Much of the motivation for the experiment and its design draw from the work of Smyth (1994), and additional aspects are motivated by the work of Wolf et al (2004). We briefly describe these two works in turn, and then follow with a discussion of our experiment.…”

“…So as to keep the results as directly comparable as possible, our design will otherwise follow Smyth's fairly closely, particularly with respect to being an offline task in which readers are explicitly asked for their pronoun assignments. Wolf et al (2004) previously tested the predictions of Kehler (2002) against both the grammatical subject and grammatical role parallelism preferences in a reading time experiment that manipulated coherence frame (Parallel/Result) and pronoun gender (masculine/feminine). Coherence was signalled by manipulating the verb in the context sentence as well as a connective between the first two clauses, specifically and similarly (which signals a Parallel relation) and and so (which signals a Result relation).…”

Assessing and Improving General English University Students’ Main Sub-skills of Reading Compression: A Case of University of Bojnord

“…Understanding pronoun referent is regarded as an important factor of reading comprehension (Al-Jarf, 2001;Badecker & Straub, 2002;Crawley & Stevenson, 1990;Demel, 1990;Huang, 2005;Pretorius, 2005;Wolf, Gibson, & Desmet, 2004). In a study by Badecker and Straub (2002) on anaphoric resolution and text comprehension, she found a significant positive relationship between overall text comprehension and coreferential tie comprehension for readers of German.…”