Representations and Processes in the Interpretation of Pronouns: New Evidence from Spanish and French

Garnham, Alan; Oakhill, Jane; Ehrlich, Marie‐France; Carreiras, Manuel

doi:10.1006/jmla.1995.1003

Cited by 71 publications

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“…In support of this second suggestion, Garnham et al (1995) noted a feature of pronominal reference in circumstances that require the antecedent to be found from the shared mental or environmental common ground of the conversation rather than from the discourse context. This kind of reference can be termed deictic.…”

Section: The Cognitive Underpinnings Of Pronoun Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…The relevant features for such a specification may include various pragmatic features as well as con-283 PRODUCING PRONOUNS ceptual features (such as natural gender, natural number, and so on). In addition to these conceptual features, speakers may also call on linguistic properties of the default categorization of the referent, as in the pants example above (Bosch, 1986;Garnham et al, 1995). This implies that speakers determine the conceptual category of the referent, access the grammatical features of the basic-level term for the category, and employ those features in selecting an appropriate pronoun.…”

Section: Selecting Pronouns For Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Exploiting a similar property in other gendermarking languages, Garnham, Oakhill, Ehrlich, and Carreiras (1995;see also Cacciari, Carreiras, & Cionini, 1997) examined reading and question-answering in Spanish and French. Their findings suggested that readers initially accessed a surface antecedent, but fairly quickly began to call on the properties of a conceptual antecedent that influenced the time taken to answer a question about the contents of the passages that they had read.…”

Section: The Cognitive Underpinnings Of Pronoun Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One preserves a distinction between the representations that surface and conceptual anaphors consult, along the lines implied above. A second, however, suggests that the two kinds of information are combined into a model of the discourse and can be drawn on interchangeably.In support of this second suggestion, Garnham et al (1995) noted a feature of pronominal reference in circumstances that require the antecedent to be found from the shared mental or environmental common ground of the conversation rather than from the discourse context. This kind of reference can be termed deictic.…”

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confidence: 92%

“…Imagine a man trying on some new trousers, inspecting himself critically in a mirror and saying to the clerk "They're too big, aren't they?" Clearly, the plural pronoun need not come from discourse reference to the plural word pants.Because these uses are natural and normal, Garnham et al (1995) suggested that the selection of pronouns during language production calls on a representation in which grammatical gender is intimately connected with semantic properties. Accordingly, the surface expression of pronouns in production may be determined interchangeably by grammatical and semantic features.…”

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Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Meyer

Bock

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

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The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical, and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns (in Experiment 1) and relative pronouns (in Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: language production; pronouns; grammatical agreement.Pronouns can be found in all languages of the world. In English and Dutch they are among the most commonly used words in print (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993) and are probably even more frequent in speech. They are fundamental to both the structure and the function of language. They are nonetheless far from simple in their conditions of use, either linguistically or cognitively, in either comprehension or production. One testimonial to their cognitive complexity comes from language acquisition, where children's problems with pronouns may persist well past the point at which the use of common nouns is firmly established (Clark, 1978;Clark & Sengul, 1978).For adult listeners, the challenges of interpreting pronouns have to do with identifying pronominal referents and antecedents from the minimal feature specifications that pronouns afford. In English, these features include little beyond number, natural gender, and animacy. Some languages add more features to the set, notably grammatical gender, but because the sparse meaning specifications of pronouns are Order of authorship is arbitrary. The research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR 94-11627), the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011), and visiting research fellowships from the Max Planck Society. We thank Femke van der Meulen and Marianne Wissink for their assistance in preparing the materials and carrying out the experiments, Don...

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Section: The Cognitive Underpinnings Of Pronoun Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Selecting Pronouns For Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Cognitive Underpinnings Of Pronoun Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 92%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Meyer

Bock

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

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Language Processing

Rayner¹,

Clifton²

2002

Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology

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In this chapter, a number of issues related to language comprehension are reviewed. The chapter consists of four main section: (1) tasks and paradigms used to study language comprehension, (2) comprehension of words, (3) comprehension of sentences, and (4) comprehension of text. For the sections on comprehending words, sentences, and text, we discuss (1) the nature of the task, (2) the core phenomena, and (3) representations and models of the specific process. Research on both reading and listening are discussed, and a number of influential models related to difference aspects of the comprehension process are discussed. While there are fully implemented models of word recognition, sentence parsing, and text comprehension, what is missing are general models of language comprehension that account for the interaction of word, sentence, and discourse comprehension. Developing such a model will not be an easy task, but the empirical facts about reading and listening reviewed in this chapter will hopefully make it possible that such an all‐encompassing model of language comprehension will be developed soon.

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Models of processing: discourse

Garnham

2010

WIRES Cognitive Science

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This article discusses models of discourse processing, primarily from a psycholinguistic perspective, though considerations from the other cognitive sciences are mentioned where appropriate. It also touches on issues of discourse representation, because questions about representation and questions about process are closely intertwined. The origins of an interest in questions about discourse are identified in Bransford's ideas from the early 1970s. Their development into more detailed models of discourse processing is discussed, and detailed descriptions are given of, in particular, anaphor processing and, to a lesser extent the establishment of coherence. Some issues that arise in connection with the production of discourse are briefly discussed, as are their relation to dialog rather than to monolog. WIREs Cogn Sci 2010 1 845-853 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

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Representations and Processes in the Interpretation of Pronouns: New Evidence from Spanish and French

Cited by 71 publications

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Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Representations and Processes in the Production of Pronouns: Some Perspectives from Dutch

Language Processing

Models of processing: discourse

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