A Bayesian Approach to German Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns

Abstract

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, an addressee must interpret it by identifying a suitable referent. It has been proposed that the interpretation of pronouns can be captured using Bayes’ Rule: P(referent|pronoun) ∝ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). This approach has been successful in English and Mandarin Chinese. In this study, we further the cross-linguistic evidence for the Bayesian model by applying it to German personal and demonstrative pronouns, and provide novel quantitative support for the model by assessing model performance in a Bayesian statistical framework that allows implementation of a fully hierarchical structure, providing the most conservative estimates of uncertainty. Data from two story-continuation experiments showed that the Bayesian model overall made more accurate predictions for pronoun interpretation than production and next-mention biases separately. Furthermore, the model accounts for the demonstrative pronoun dieser as well as the personal pronoun, despite the demonstrative having different, and more rigid, resolution preferences.

Strong semantic biases make demonstrative pronouns act like personal pronouns

“…A similar close fit was found by Bader & Portele (2019) in the first application of the Bayesian Theory to p-and d-pronouns in German, but there semantic biases were rather weak so structural factors had to bear the burden of resolving the referential ambiguity. Taken together, the results presented here and the results presented in Bader & Portele (2019) show that the Bayesian Theory accounts for the interpretation of German p-and d-pronouns under widely different combinations of structural and semantic biases (see also Bader 2020, andPatterson et al 2022).…”

“…9 While this paper was under review, the study by Patterson et al (2022) appeared. Like our study, this study found that semantic bias affects p-and d-pronouns in similar ways, and that the Bayesian model of Kehler and colleagues accounts for the interpretation of both p-and d-pronouns.…”

Effects of referential structure on pronoun interpretation

“…To the best of our knowledge, the existence of referential structure effects on pronoun resolution has received little attention in psycholinguistic experiments. Generally speaking, prior experimental work on pronoun interpretation has mostly tested pronoun use and interpretation after transitive sentences mentioning two animate referents (e.g., Bott & Solstad, 2014;Ferstl, 2011;Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013;Hartshorne et al, 2015;Kehler et al, 2008;Patterson et al, 2022;Runner & Ibarra, 2016;Schumacher et al, 2017; see also Kehler et al, 2008;Rohde et al, 2006;Stevenson et al,1994;Ueno & Kehler, 2016 on ditransitive sentences). However, these studies and others usually focus only on the interpretation and use of subject pronouns (e.g., Arnold, 1998;Colonna et al, 2012Colonna et al, , 2014Cowles,et al, 2007;Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013;Kaiser, 2011a;Koornneef & Sanders, 2013;Rohde et al, 2006) -in other words, they do not systematically test whether and how the presence of a subsequent pronoun after a subject-position pronoun would influence pronoun resolution.…”

“…Kehler, 2002 led to an increase in psycholinguistics studies recognizing the importance of controlling for coherence relations (e.g., Kaiser, 2011b on Result vs. Narrative relations; Kertz et al, 2006;Kehler et al, 2008;Wolf et al, 2004 Bott & Solstad, 2014;Patterson et al, 2022;Stevenson et al,1994 ), as well as Experiencer(dative)-Patient(nominative) verbs in German (e.g., Fuchs & Schumacher, 2020;Patterson et al, 2022;Schumacher et al, 2016Schumacher et al, , 2017. In our studies, we chose to focus specifically on implicit-causality configurations involving explanation relations (signalled by a because connective), while testing four different verb types that differ in their thematic-role properties.…”

“…Prior work also shows effects of antecedents' thematic roles. Most relevantly for us, in causal contexts with implicit causality (IC) verbs, subsequent pronouns tend to be interpreted as referring to Stimulus referents more often than Experiencers (e.g., Au, 1986;Bott & Solstad, 2014;Caramazza et al, 1977;Ferstl, 2011;Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013;McKoon et al, 1993;Patterson et al, 2022;Rudolph & Försterling, 1997).…”