Supporting materials for Ye & Arnold (2024)
Implicit Causality Affects Pronoun Use in Interactive Fragment Completion Tasks
Elaine (Yining) Ye and Jennifer E. Arnold
Abstract
An unresolved debate surrounds the question of whether speakers pay attention to predictability when choosing referential expressions. Numerous studies have examined predictability in the context of implicit causality using a fragment completion task and found that speakers do not use more pronouns for the implicit cause (e.g., Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010; Rohde & Kehler, 2014). However, a recent study found an effect of implicit causality on pronoun use, using a novel story retelling paradigm with rich context information (Weatherford & Arnold, 2021). The current study investigates whether incorporating a richer context allows the effect of implicit causality on pronoun use to be observed in fragment completion tasks. Participants were introduced to six characters in a story setting with pictures, read stage-setting context sentences and provided natural endings to fragment prompts. We found that implicit causality did affect pronoun use in one experiment, but this effect was fragile, dependent on task conditions, and moreover did not replicate. We conclude that this effect is not likely to emerge in fragment completion tasks, despite its robust effect in Weatherford & Arnold’s story retelling paradigm.
Data available here: https://osf.io/87yrn/
Many thanks to Kathryn Weatherford for her help with the human subjects protocol and for sharing the stimuli from Weatherford & Arnold (2021).
Portions of this study were presented at the following conferences:
Ye, Y. & Arnold, J. E. (2024). Implicit Causality Affects Pronoun Use in Interactive Fragment Completion Tasks. Poster (expected) at the Human Sentence Processing Conference, U. Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, June 2024.
Ye, Y., & Arnold, J. E. (2022). Implicit Causality Can Affect Pronoun Use in Fragment Completion Tasks. Poster, Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing, York, England, 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).