Effects of referential structure on pronoun interpretation

ABSTRACTPronoun interpretation is guided by various factors. While most previously-investigated factors involve properties occurring before the pronoun, less attention has been paid to properties of the pronoun-containing clause. We investigate whether pronoun interpretation is influenced by the referential structure of the pronoun-containing clause (i.e. whether another referent from the preceding clause is mentioned), which contributes to discourse coherence. We report three experiments showing referential structure effects: whether subject-position pronouns are ultimately interpreted as referring to the preceding subject or object depends on whether the clause contains another pronoun (e.g. she called Lisa vs. she called her). More specifically, subject-position pronouns exhibit a stronger object preference when only one of the prior antecedents is mentioned, compared to when both are mentioned. We show that this effect is separate from effects of verb semantics and cannot be reduced to semantic or syntactic parallelism effects. Implications for models of pronoun resolution are discussed.KEYWORDS: Pronoun interpretationdiscourse coherenceimplicit causalitytransitivityreference resolution AcknowledgementsThanks to Ian Rigby and Jesse Storbeck for help with creating the experimental stimuli. We would like to thank audiences at the 3rd California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP) 2019 (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2020 (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA), the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI) 2020, the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2021 (University of Pennsylvania, USA), the 2021 Winter LSK Young Scholar Symposium (Seoul, Korea), the 4th California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP) 2021 (University of California, Irvine, USA), and the Human Sentence Processing (HSP) conference 2022 (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA), in which earlier versions of some of this research were presented. An earlier version of some of the results from Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 was included in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Song & Kaiser, Citation2020b).Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Ethics statementThe studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the University of Southern California Institutional Review Board. Written informed consent was waived for this study.Notes1 Previous papers on IC verb effects that used nonce words (e.g. Hartshorne & Snedeker, Citation2013; Hartshorne et al., Citation2015) show that meaningful results about pronoun resolution patterns can be successfully obtained with designs using nonce words (see also Burnsky et al., Citation2022). In addition, earlier results from Kaiser (Citation2009) using a paradigm without nonce words are compatible with our findings. These prior studies suggest that the results reported in the present paper are not artifact stemming from our use of nonce verbs.2 In this experiment (and the two following ones as well), the absolute proportion of object interpretations is somewhat higher than one might expect given the existing norms (Ferstl et al., Citation2011; Hartshorne & Snedeker, Citation2013). A similar increase in object interpretations was also observed by Hartshorne et al. (Citation2015). Crucially, this is not problematic for the main claims we are making, since we are interested in relative differences between IC1 and IC2 verbs (which clearly obtain in our results), not in absolute numbers.3 The number of catch trials in Experiment 2 is higher than in Experiment 1, because Experiment 2 included transitive as well as intransitive sentences as unambiguous catch trials. This was done to ensure participants saw a mix of transitive and intransitive sentences over the course of Experiment 2 (where all targets were transitive), to keep it similar to Experiment 1 (which had both transitive and intransitive targets).4 As mentioned earlier, the Evocator role is equivalent to Patient, semantically. The term Evocator is used simply to distinguish agent-patient verbs that elicit IC1 bias (Agent-Patient) from those that elicit IC2 bias (Agent-Evocator, (e.g. Au, Citation1986; Ferstl et al., Citation2011; Rudolph & Försterling, Citation1997). Thus, for our purposes, all verbs in Experiment 3 have an agent argument and a patient argument.5 In Stevenson et al. (Citation1994), a subject-position pronoun preferred a Patient antecedent over an Agent antecedent with AP verbs, but no overall preference for a certain semantic role was found with SE/ES verbs (it varied depending on connective type). Stevenson et al. argued that the patient preference “reflects the salience of the consequences of the described events. Since experiencer-stimulus sentences describe states rather than events, they are not subject to comparable focusing in the constructed representation” (Stevenson et al., Citation1994, p. 540).