Pronoun Resolution and the Influence of Syntactic and Semantic Information on Discourse Prominence

Rose, Ralph L.

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-71412-5_3

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The interpretation of pronominal anaphors is a process which is instantiated at the syntax–discourse interface. Syntactic and semantic properties of antecedents have been shown to constrain the interpretation of a pronoun, for instance grammatical role (Crawley, Stevenson, & Kleinman, 1990), word order (Gernsbacher & Hargreaves, 1988), or thematic roles (Prat-Sala & Branigan, 1999; Rose, 2007). Extra-linguistic factors like the presence of referents in the physical environment, world knowledge and reasoning, or pragmatic conversational principles also play a significant role for the establishment of a coherent discourse.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of intersentential pronouns in child German and child Bulgarian

Bittner

Kuehnast

2011

First Language

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This article investigates the acquisition of pronominal resolution as a process instantiated at the syntax–discourse interface. Based on current psycholinguistic proposals concerning the gradual development from a more context-driven towards a linguistically constrained representation of discourse referents, we conducted an experimental study investigating the impact of the antecedent properties animacy and syntactic role on the resolution of personal and demonstrative pronouns. Participants were 3- and 5-year-old monolingual German- and Bulgarian-speaking children. Results suggest that the 3-year-olds establish one pronoun type as a default in their early anaphoric system. Five-year-olds resolve personal pronouns to the maximally salient antecedent which they determine by a joint consideration of the subject and animacy status of available referents. The resolution of demonstratives shows initial language-specific constraints.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension of intersentential pronouns in child German and child Bulgarian

Bittner

Kuehnast

2011

First Language

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“…Gordon et al (1993) claim that the repeated-name penalty is applicable to all defi nite descriptions, not just names. It should be noted that much experimental work in this area has focused on names (e.g., Gordon et al, 1993;Gordon & Scearce, 1995;Rose, 2007;Fukumara & Van Gompel, 2010;Gelormini-Lezama & Almor, 2011). This leaves open the question of whether the repeated-name penalty would be seen if defi nite descriptions were repeated.…”

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confidence: 99%

Discourse Coherence in Pronoun Resolution

Patterson¹

2013

discours

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According to “Centering Theory”, an entity that links to the prior discourse could receive a boost in the current prominence ranking. Such a boost will affect pronoun processing because pronouns tend to seek out the most prominent entity for reference. The current paper presents a reanalysis of data from a study that investigated how pronoun processing was affected by the prior discourse. In an eye-movement monitoring experiment, English speakers were presented with texts that manipulated (1) the pronoun’s gender match with possible antecedents and (2) the appearance of the antecedents in prior discourse. The results showed that prior discourse affected eye-movement measures from the pronoun region onwards, but the antecedents were differently affected by this manipulation. The results can be accounted for if the overall discourse coherence is taken into account, especially the number of switches in attention that a reader/hearer has to make. More attention switches in a relatively short discourse may have created uncertainty about the local discourse topic, making pronoun processing more problematic. This study shows that the prior discourse can influence the processing of pronouns, but processing is also affected by coherence

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Pronoun Resolution and the Influence of Syntactic and Semantic Information on Discourse Prominence

Cited by 2 publications

References 22 publications

Comprehension of intersentential pronouns in child German and child Bulgarian

Comprehension of intersentential pronouns in child German and child Bulgarian

Discourse Coherence in Pronoun Resolution

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