The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Pronoun resolution is a complex cognitive process influenced by various linguistic cues.
• Implicit causality (IC) refers to the tendency for certain verbs to bias pronoun interpretation towards the subject or object.
• The interplay between IC, grammatical role, and order of mention in pronoun resolution remains an active area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the temporal dynamics of implicit causality information in Finnish pronoun resolution.
• To determine how implicit causality interacts with grammatical role and order of mention.
• To examine differential effects of structural prominence on personal pronouns versus demonstratives.

Main Methods:

• Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments were conducted with Finnish speakers.
• Participants viewed scenes while listening to sentences designed to elicit pronoun resolution.
• Verb semantic roles were counterbalanced to isolate the effect of grammatical role.

Main Results:

• Implicit causality effects emerged concurrently with first-mention preferences.
• Grammatical role showed no significant effect when semantic roles were counterbalanced, indicating a strong semantic component.
• Both personal pronoun 'hän' and demonstrative 'tämä' preferred antecedents aligning with IC bias.
• Structural prominence influenced 'hän' (first-mention preference) and 'tämä' (second-mention preference) differently.

Conclusions:

• Semantic implicit causality information exerts an immediate influence on pronoun resolution, not delayed by order-of-mention.
• Order-of-mention affects different anaphoric expressions distinctly.
• Semantic information, however, appears to have a uniform effect across different anaphoric expressions.