NSF Project: Pronouns, Predictability, and Print Exposure (#1651000)
NSF Project: Testing probability-based theories of pronoun comprehension (2017-2021).
This NSF-funded project tests the role of predictability in understanding pronouns. Pronouns are one of the most frequent words in English, but third-person pronouns (he, she, it) require people to infer the right referent from context. How do people do this? One possibility is that people generate expectations (unconsciously) about what the speaker might say next, and use this to help narrow possible interpretations of the pronoun. For example, if I think you are likely to continue talking about Ana in “Ana hugged Liz, then…”, I will assume that the next word “she” refers to Ana, and not Liz. In fact, many models suggest that predictability plays a some role in pronoun comprehension (Arnold, 2001; Hartshorne et al., 2015; Kehler & Rohde, 2013). But the role of predictability has not been broadly tested. Most research has focused on how the semantics of a sentence can make you expect one person or another to be mentioned next. But we know that many other factors influence pronoun comprehension, including a preference to assign pronouns to the subject or topic (Chafe, 1976), and a tendency to follow the speaker’s gaze or point gestures (Nappa & Arnold, 2014). We also know that individuals differ in how strongly they follow a subject-assignment strategy, where people who read a lot follow this strategy more strongly than people who don’t read as much (Arnold et al, 2018). Does predictability underlie all of these effects?
This project tests a set of inter-related questions about pronoun comprehension, predictability, and print exposure. The over-arching idea is to test the factors that influence pronoun comprehension, and test the factors that influence predictions about who will be mentioned next, and see if they are similar. We also test individual differences in print exposure (aka reading) and other measures that are not expected to matter (SES, language skill, working memory), and examine how these relate to both prediction and pronoun comprehension.
RESEARCHERS ON THIS PROJECT:
Paper Publications from this project
Journal Articles
Langlois, V. J., Zerkle, S., & Arnold, J. E. (2023). Does Referential Expectation Guide Both Linguistic and Social Constraints on Pronoun Comprehension? Journal of Memory and Language. [SUPPORTING MATERIALS]
Johnson, E., & Arnold, J. E. (2023; 2022 online). The Frequency of Referential Patterns Guides Pronoun Comprehension. JEP:LMC. [SUPPORTING MATERIALS]
Guan, S. & Arnold, J. E. (2021). The predictability of implicit causes: testing frequency and topicality explanations. Discourse Processes. DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2021.1974690
Johnson, E.*, & Arnold, J. E. (2021). Individual differences in print exposure predicts use of implicit causality in pronoun comprehension and referential prediction. Frontiers, 12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672109. [JOURNAL ARTICLE] [SUPPORTING MATERIALS]
* note E. Johnson is the same person as E. Williams.
Arnold, J. E., Mayo, H., & Dong, L. (2021). My pronouns are they/them: Talking about pronouns promotes singular they. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. [SUPPORTING MATERIALS]
Langlois, V., & Arnold, J. E. (2020). Print exposure explains individual differences in using syntactic but not semantic cues for pronoun comprehension. Cognition, 197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104155. [MATERIALS]
Arnold, J. E., Strangmann, I., Hwang, H., Zerkle, S., & Nappa, R. (2018). Linguistic experience affects pronoun interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language, 102, 41-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.05.002.[SUPPORTING MATERIALS]
Book Chapters
Arnold, J.E. & Zerkle, S. (2022). Who gets mentioned next? The answer depends on the experimental task. In Chiara Gianollo, C.; Jędrzejowski, Ł; & Lindermann, S. I. (Eds.) Paths through meaning and form: Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18716/omp.3.c11
Technical Reports
Johnson, E. & Arnold, J. E. (2021). Does SES affect pronoun comprehension and prediction in implicit causality scenarios? Technical Report #4. UNC Language Processing Lab, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. [TECHNICAL REPORT]
Arnold, J. E., Mayo, H., & Dong, L. (2020). Individual differences (or the lack of them) in comprehension of singular Technical Report #3. UNC Language Processing Lab, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Technical Report #3
Arnold, J. E., Strangmann, I., Hwang, H., & Zerkle, S. (2018). Reference frequency: what do speakers tend to talk about? UNC Language Processing Lab, Technical Report #2 Technical Report #2
Under review
Ye, Y. & Arnold, J. E. (under review). Implicit causality affects pronoun use in interactive fragment completion tasks. Ms., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [SUPPORTING MATERIALS] (email for copy of paper) [co-funded by NSF #1917840]
Arnold, J. E. (under review). Why does recency guide pronoun comprehension? It’s not just topicality, attention, or predictability. Ms., UNC Chapel Hill. [SUPPORTING MATERIALS] (email for copy of paper) [co-funded by NSF #1917840]
Theses
Williams, E. (2020). Language experience affects pronoun comprehension in implicit causality sentences. Masters thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Guan, S. (2019). Referential Predictability and Topicality Diverge in Implicit Causality. Senior Thesis, Swarthmore College, Dept. of Linguistics.
Papers in preparation
Arnold, J. E. (In preparation). Are recently-mentioned referents predictable? Ms., University of North Carolina.
Conference presentations from this project
Ye, Y. & Arnold, J. E. (2024). Implicit Causality Affects Pronoun Use in Interactive Fragment Completion Tasks. Poster, Human Sentence Processing Conference, U. Michigan. (June 2024).
Ye, Y., Weatherford, K., & Arnold, J. E. Implicit Causality Can Affect Pronoun Use in Fragment Completion Tasks. Poster, Amlap, York. (Sept. 2022).
Ye, Y., Weatherford, K., & Arnold, J. E. Implicit Causality Can Affect Pronoun Use in Fragment Completion Tasks. Brief Talk, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Pennsylvania, virtual (March 2021).
Arnold, J. E., Mayo, H. & Dong, L. Singular they understood better after explicit introduction. Talk, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (March 2020). [VIDEO OF TALK AVAILABLE AT OSF]
Langlois, V. & Arnold, J. E. Prediction explains effects of both semantic and social cues on pronoun interpretation. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (March 2020). [POSTER AT OSF]
Williams, E. & Arnold, J. E. Language experience affects pronoun comprehension in implicit causality sentences. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (March 2020). [POSTER AT OSF]
Williams, E. & Arnold, J. E. Priming discourse structure guides pronoun comprehension. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Colorado (March 2019).
Langlois, V., Zerkle, S., & Arnold, J. E. Do animated cues elicit similar patterns of pronoun comprehension as live cues. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Colorado (March 2019). [poster]
Guan, S. & Arnold, J. E. Referential Predictability and Topicality Diverge in Implicit Causality. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Colorado (March 2019).
Langlois, V. & Arnold, J. E. Individual differences guide pronoun interpretation in semantically constraining contexts. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Colorado (March 2019).
Zerkle, S. & Arnold, J. E. Similar discourse properties guide both topicality & referential predictability judgments. Poster, CUNY conference on human sentence processing, University of Colorado (March 2019).
Zerkle, S. & Arnold, J. E. Discourse constraints on referential predictability: is the subject predictable? Poster presented at the CUNY conference on human sentence processing, UC Davis. (March 2018).
Williams, E. & Arnold, J. E. How broad is the effect of reading exposure on language processing? Poster presented at the CUNY conference on human sentence processing, UC Davis. (March 2018).
Arnold, J. E., Strangmann, I., Hwang, H., Zerkle, S., & Castro-Schilo, L. (September, 2017). Who are you talking about? Individual differences in pronoun comprehension. Talk presented at Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing, Lancaster University, UK