Reference Comprehension
Language is filled with reference. In fact, we can’t talk without referring to things. But references are highly ambiguous, so comprehenders need to do a lot of cognitive work to figure out what the referent is. How do people use the linguistic and visual context to make predictions about who will be mentioned next, and how does this constrain reference comprehension? What constraints guide pronoun comprehension? How do people learn discourse constraints from experience? The following studies explore these questions.
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Visual world eyetracking and referential prediction: Disfluency |
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- Arnold, Tanenhaus, Altmann, & Fagnano (2004), Psychological Science – disfluency gives rise to a bias toward discourse-new referents
- for an earlier version of this work see also Arnold, Fagnano, & Tanenhaus, (2003), Journal of Psycholingusitic Research
- Arnold, Hudson-Kam, & Tanenhaus (2007), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition — disfluency gives rise to a bias toward unfamiliar referents
- Arnold & Tanenhaus (2011) – chapter about disfluency research
- Heller, Arnold, Klein, & Tanenhaus (2015) – flexibility in the disfluency effect
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Other visual world eyetracking and reference processing |
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- Arnold & Lao (2008), LCN – Heavy-NP-shift and referential prediction
- Arnold (2008). Cognition – accenting and referential comprehension in adults and children
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Pronoun Comprehension |
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- Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell (2000), Cognition – eyetracking method shows first-mention bias, recency bias, and use of gender for third person pronoun interpretation
- Nappa & Arnold (2014), Cognitive Psychology – gaze and pointing affects pronoun comprehension
- Arnold & Lao (2015), Discourse Processes – women show a stronger fist-mention bias than men during pronoun comprehension
- Arnold, Strangmann, Hwang, Zerkle, & Nappa (2018), JML — during pronoun comprehension, people who read more follow the linguistic context (the first-mention bias) more strongly than people who read less
- Langlois & Arnold (2020) , Cognition – pronoun comprehension with transfer verbs
- Arnold, Castro-Schilo, Zerkle, & Rao (2019), Journal of Child Language – children reveal a stronger first-mention bias if they read a lot
- Arnold, Mayo, & Dong (2020), PBR – interpetation of nonbinary “they” is supported by explicit pronoun introduction
- Johnson, E. & Arnold, J. E. (2021). Individual differences in print exposure predict use of implicit causality in pronoun comprehension and referential prediction. Frontiers, 12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672109
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