The Effect of Thematic Roles on Pronoun Use and Frequency of Reference Continuation

Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that has been linked to the reader’s tendency to focus on the consequences of the event (Stevenson, Crawley, & Kleinman, 1994). Using a story continuation ex-periment, I show that speakers also tend to use pronouns more often for goal entities than source entities. Furthermore, the experiment and a corpus analysis reveal that speakers tend to refer more frequently to goal entities than source entities overall. I use the parallel findings about pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation to argue that referent accessibility is influenced by the comprehender’s estimate of the likelihood that a referent will be continued in the discourse. Pronoun comprehension has been argued to be influenced by the accessibility of potential referents in the discourse representation, which is driven by a number of factors (see Arnold, 1998, for a review). One such factor that has received atten-tion is the thematic roles of discourse referents (e.g., Garnham, Traxler, Oakhill

The effects of utterance timing and stimulation of left prefrontal cortex on the production of referential expressions

We examined the relationship between the timing of utterance initiation and the choice of referring expressions, e.g., pronouns (it), zeros (…and went down), or descriptive NPs (the pink pentagon). We examined language production in healthy adults, and used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test the involvement of the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) on the timing of utterance production and the selection of reference forms in a discourse context. Twenty-two subjects (11 anodal, 11 sham) described fast-paced actions, e.g. The gray oval flashes, then it moves right 2 blocks. We only examined trials in contexts that supported pronoun/zero use. For sham participants, pronouns/zeros increased on trials with longer latencies to initiate the target utterance, and trials where the previous trial was short. We argue that both of these conditions enabled greater message pre-planning and greater discourse connectedness: The strongest predictor of pronoun/zero usage was the presence of a connector word like and or then, which was also tended to occur on trials with longer latencies. For the anodal participants, the latency effect disappeared. PFC stimulation appeared to enable participants to produce utterances with greater discourse connectedness, even while planning incrementally

Does pre-planning explain why predictability affects reference production?

How does thematic role predictability affect reference production? This study tests a planning facilitation hypothesis – that the predictability effect on reference form can be explained in terms of the time course of utterance planning. In a discourse production task, participants viewed two sequential event pictures, listened to a description of the first picture (depicting a transfer event between two characters), and then provided a description of the second picture (continuing with one thematic role character, either goal or source). We replicated previous findings that goal continuations lead to more reduced forms of reference and shorter latency to begin speaking than source continuations. Additionally, we tracked speakers’ eye movements in two periods of utterance planning, early vs. late. We found that 1) early pre-planning supports the use of reduced forms but is not affected by thematic role; 2) thematic role only affects late planning; and 3) in contrast with our hypothesis, planning does not account for predictability effects on reduced forms. We then speculate that discourse connectedness drives the thematic role predictability effect on reference form choice

THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases

Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4 and 5 year old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 msec after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children’s on-line reference comprehension (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, in press), showing that children’s interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object

Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

It is known that acoustic variation is influenced by the predictability of words and the information that they represent. What is unknown is whether acoustic reduction is also influenced by the referential predictability of thematic roles. We tested this question in two production experiments, where speakers heard a sentence with goal/source arguments, e.g., “Lady Mannerly [source] gave a painting to Sir Barnes [goal],” and described a picture of a subsequent action, e.g., “Sir Barnes threw it in the closet.” We analyzed the duration of full NP descriptions used to refer to the pictured character. We found that duration was shorter for references to the goal than the source, but only in Experiment 2, where the timing of the stimuli encouraged the participant to plan their response incrementally, and not Experiment 1, where participants could pre-plan their responses. The strongest finding across both experiments was that response latency predicted duration, and latency was influenced by the predictability of thematic roles: Goal continuations had significantly shorter latencies. Together, these findings suggest that thematic role predictability does affect acoustic duration, and may be related to the time needed for utterance planning

The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts☆

Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another character in the discourse decreased pronoun use and increased latencies to refer to the most prominent character in the discourse. In other words, speakers were more likely to call Minnie Minnie than shewhen Donald was also present. Even when the referent character appeared alone in the stimulus picture, the presence of another character in the preceding discourse reduced pronouns. Furthermore, pronoun use varied with features associated with the speaker’s degree of focus on the preceding discourse (e.g., narrative style and disfluency). We attribute this effect to competition for attentional resources in the speaker’s representation of the discourse

Synthesising meaning and processing approaches to prosody: performance matters

Words vary in acoustic prominence; for example repeated words tend to be reduced, while focused elements tend to be acoustically prominent. We discuss two approaches to this phenomenon. On the message-based view, acoustic choices signal the speaker’s meaning or pragmatics, or are guided by syntactic structure. On the facilitation-based view, reduced forms reflect facilitation of production processing mechanisms. We argue that message-based constraints correlate systematically with production facilitation. Moreover, we argue that discourse effects on acoustic reduction may be at least partially mediated by processing facilitation. Thus, research needs to simultaneously consider both competence (message) and performance (processing) constraints on prosody, specifically in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying acoustic reduction. To facilitate this goal, we present preliminary processing models of message-based and facilitation-based approaches, and outline directions for future research

Contact structures in the poultry industry in Great Britain: Exploring transmission routes for a potential avian influenza virus epidemic

Background: The commercial poultry industry in United Kingdom (UK) is worth an estimated £3.4 billion at retail value, producing over 174 million birds for consumption per year. An epidemic of any poultry disease with high mortality or which is zoonotic, such as avian influenza virus (AIV), would result in the culling of significant numbers of birds, as seen in the Netherlands in 2003 and Italy in 2000. Such an epidemic would cost the UK government millions of pounds in compensation costs, with further economic losses through reduction of international and UK consumption of British poultry. In order to better inform policy advisers and makers on the potential for a large epidemic in GB, we investigate the role that interactions amongst premises within the British commercial poultry industry could play in promoting an AIV epidemic, given an introduction of the virus in a specific part of poultry industry in Great Britain (GB). Results: Poultry premises using multiple slaughterhouses lead to a large number of premises being potentially connected, with the resultant potential for large and sometimes widespread epidemics. Catching companies can also potentially link a large proportion of the poultry population. Critical to this is the maximum distance traveled by catching companies between premises and whether or not between-species transmission could occur within individual premises. Premises closely linked by proximity may result in connections being formed between different species and or sectors within the industry. Conclusion: Even quite well-contained epidemics have the potential for geographically widespread dissemination, potentially resulting in severe logistical problems for epidemic control, and with economic impact on a large part of the country. Premises sending birds to multiple slaughterhouses or housing multiple species may act as a bridge between otherwise separate sectors of the industry, resulting in the potential for large epidemics. Investment into further data collection and analyses on the importance of industry structure as a determinant for spread of AIV would enable us to use the results from this study to contribute to policy on disease control

Effects of psychological attention on pronoun comprehension

Pronoun comprehension is facilitated for referents that are focused in the discourse context. Discourse focus has been described as a function of attention, especially shared attention, but few studies have explicitly tested this idea. Two experiments used an exogenous capture cue paradigm to demonstrate that listeners’ visual attention at the onset of a story influences their preferences during pronoun resolution later in the story. In both experiments trial-initial attention modulated listeners’ transitory biases while considering referents for the pronoun, whether it was in response to the capture cue or not. These biases even had a small influence on listeners’ final interpretation of the pronoun. These results provide independently-motivated evidence that the listener’s attention influences the on-line processes of pronoun comprehension. Trial-initial attentional shifts were made on the basis of non-shared, private information, demonstrating that attentional effects on pronoun comprehension are not restricted to shared attention among interlocutors

Reference production in young speakers with and without autism: Effects of discourse status and processing constraints

We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made during a narrative by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to depend on two areas of cognitive functioning: a) judging the attention and knowledge of one’s interlocutor, and b) the use of memory and attention mechanisms to represent the discourse situation. We predicted possible group differences, since autism is often associated with deficits in a) mentalizing and b) memory and attention, as well as a more general tendency to have difficulty with the pragmatic aspects of language use. Results revealed that some of the participants with autism were significantly less likely to produce pronouns or zeros in some discourse contexts. However, the difference was only one of degree. Overall, all participants in our analysis exhibited fine-grained sensitivity to the discourse context. Furthermore, referential choices for all participants were modulated by factors related to the cognitive effort of language production