Supporting Materials for Johnson & Arnold (2022)
Exposure to the frequency of discourse patterns guides pronoun comprehension. (2022) JEP:LMC.
Elyce Johnson and Jennifer E. Arnold
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Abstract
There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential tokens can be multiply categorized, raising questions about what can be learned through referential exposure. We test the role of linguistic exposure to referential patterns in five experiments on pronoun comprehension, examining linguistic contexts like “X is doing something with Y” (Exps. 1a,b, and c) and transfer events like “X gave something to Y” (Exps. 2a and b). We ask whether the interpretation of ambiguous he/she pronouns is influenced by recent exposure and find that indeed it is, supporting the hypothesis that adaptation affects discourse processing. In Exp. 1, we further ask whether adaptation persists across three types of referring expressions (he/she pronouns, I/you pronouns, and names) and find that it is limited to he/she pronouns. In Exp. 2, we test whether people can learn both syntactically conditioned and semantically conditioned frequency patterns with transfer verbs. Results showed that they learned both patterns. These effects of local exposure further occur in the context of individual differences, as illustrated by the tendency for participants with higher print exposure following the subject bias more strongly than those with lower print exposure. Results are consistent with exposure-based models of discourse processing and probability-based models of pronoun comprehension.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by NSF grants 1651000 and 1917840 to J. Arnold. We are grateful Taylor Steele and Avery Wall for their extensive work on experiments 2a and 2b. We also thank Braxton Hawkins, Darith Klibanow, Heather Mayo, Gustavo Nativio, and Lamar Richards, for their assistance in preparing the stimuli and Qualtrics scripts.
Data
Data and study materials are provided in supplementary materials which can be accessed here: https://osf.io/qb2c3.