Factors influencing assignment of pronoun antecedents

Garvey, Catherine; Caramazza, Alfonso; Yates, Jack

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(74)90010-9

Cited by 136 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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Section: Two Views About Implicit Causalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Caramazza and his colleagues have shown that there are strong effects in off-line tasks, such as sentence completion (Garvey et al, 1975;Grober et al, 1978), as, indeed, there must be if the bias of individual verbs (or clauses) is to be established. In on-line tasks the picture is less clear.…”

Section: Implicit Causality and Focusingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…presentation is in terms of verbs imputing cause, with other factors, such as the social status of the participants, influencing or attenuating the basic effect (1974, p. 462). In later writings (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates, 1977;Garvey, Caramazza, & Yates, 1975;Grober, Beardsley, & Caramazza, 1978) this emphasis on verbs is accentuated.1 With emphasis on the pronoun and an accompanying pointing gesture (in the spoken version), or in context, the reference of the pronoun can be something not mentioned in the. sentence itself: Betty punished Diane three weeks ago because SHE ordered her to.…”

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The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

Garnham

Traxler

Oakhill

et al. 1996

Journal of Memory and Language

151

127

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Implicit causality might enable readers to focus on the imputed cause of an event and make it the default referent of a following pronoun. Alternatively, its effects might arise only when a following explicit cause is integrated with a description of the event. In three probe recognition experiments, in which the participants in the events were of the same sex, the only reliable effect -apart from the advantage of first mention -was that of whether implicit and explicit causes were the same. This effect was independent of whether the probe named the referent of the pronoun. In a fourth experiment, in which the two participants were of different sexes, there was no simple effect of implicit causality, but there was an advantage for the pronoun's referent. These results are consistent with the view that implicit causality has its effects at integration. We discuss their broader implications for theories of comprehension.There is a growing consensus that mental representations of the content of text take the form of discourse models (e.g., Garnham, 1981Garnham, , 1987Johnson-Laird & Garnham, 1980;Greene, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1992;Stenning, 1978;Webber, 1979) and that the primary goal of a theory of text comprehension is to specify the nature of such models and of the processes that construct them. Discourse models contain representations of people, things, events (in the broad sense of that term used in semantic theory; see e.g., Frawley, 1992, in which it covers acts, actions, states, and processes), and so on, in the real, or an imaginary, world. However, beyond this basic specification, there is considerable disagreement about their nature and about the mental processes that build them. One important issue is the extent to which discourse models are elaborated using information that is not explicit in a text, but which must be derived inferentially (see e.g., , vs Garnham, 1992, and Glenberg & Mathew, 1992. Another set of issues, and one that has received less attention in the psychological literature, concerns the internal structure of discourse models. These issues, which can loosely be dubbed "issues-of focus," are crucial to online theories Address correspondence and reprint requests to Alan Garnham, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, United Kingdom. Tele-phone: +44 1273 678337. Fax: +44 1273 678611. alang@epunix.sussex.ac.uk. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript of text comprehension, because the internal structure of discourse models determines which parts of those models are most available in memory. It is one of these issues that we address in this paper.Some of the things mentioned in a text are in focus and, therefore, readily available for later reference, and others are not. Both local, sentence level, and global, discourse level, mechanisms may contribute to whether an item is in focus and hence can readily be referred to again (e.g., using a pronoun). However, the details of these mechanisms rema...

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Section: Two Views About Implicit Causalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Implicit Causality and Focusingmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

Garnham

Traxler

Oakhill

et al. 1996

Journal of Memory and Language

151

127

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“…For this reason, both these effects, and a host of closely related phenomena, have been treated as a single construct which is generally called "implicit causality" (Brown & Fish, 1983a;Garvey, Caramazza, & Yates, 1974).…”

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confidence: 99%

Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics

Hartshorne

Snedeker

2012

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…This particular inference pattern about event initiation is better known as the causality implicit in interpersonal verbs (cf. Brown & Fish, 1983;Garvey & Caramazza, 1974;Garvey, Caramazza, & Yates, 1976;Hoffman & Tchir, 1990;Semin & Marsman, 1994). Semin et al (1995) put this particular property of action and state verbs into use in a question-answer context.…”

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confidence: 99%

The question–answer paradigm: You might regret not noticing how a question is worded.

Semin¹,

Poot²

1997

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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In 2 experiments the authors investigated how verb choice in question formulation influences respondents' answers. These studies show that (a) as hypothesized, the choice of verb type (action vs, state) in forming a question influences interviewees' narratives systematically by impacting, inter alia, which individual is implicitly described as the causal originator of a social event; (b) interviewees are not aware of how their answers are manipulated; and (c) others who listen to or read the very same answers are sensitive to the linguistic differences in the narratives that are shaped by verb choices in question formulation. The implications of these findings for the self-fulfilling prophecy are discussed.How one answers questions can have dramatic consequences. It can make a difference between getting or losing a job, being convicted or released, and being trusted or distrusted. Obviously, the way one asks questions is also crucial and can have similar existential implications, such as making the difference between getting married or being dumped or between going out on a date or picking daisies. In two studies, we investigated how answers are shaped by the verbs used in forming the questions. This issue gives rise to three interrelated questions that we address here: (a) Are respondents' answers influenced by the types of predicates (verbs) that are used in question formulation? (b) If so, are respondents aware of this influence? (c) Moreover, do third parties detect the influence of question formulation on the answers when they read or listen to the answers? The match or mismatch between respondents' and third parties' perceptions clearly also becomes a critical issue, because the implications of mismatches can be far reaching.The research paradigm that we used to investigate these questions is the question-answer paradigm (QAP; Semin, Rubini, & Fiedler, 1995). The core theme of the QAP is that there are systematic differences in the way in which people answer two questions that are similar on the surface but differ in terms of the type of verb used in formulating the question. Consider the questions ''Why do you like the Washington Post?" and "Why do you read the Washington Post?" Both questions may appear to be requests to explain one's newspaper preference. If, however, the different verbs used in these two questions lead to answers that differ systematically in terms of how the explanation is grounded, then one would conclude that the choice of verb influences answers.

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Factors influencing assignment of pronoun antecedents

Cited by 136 publications

References 2 publications

The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

The Locus of Implicit Causality Effects in Comprehension

Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics

The question–answer paradigm: You might regret not noticing how a question is worded.

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