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The Influence of Focus Marking on Pronoun Resolution in Dialogue Context
Liam P Blything1,2, Juhani Järvikivi1, Abigail G Toth1,3
1Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
Frontiers in Psychology
|August 12, 2021
Summary
Adults and children use focus cues like prosody to interpret ambiguous pronouns, but children
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Pronoun resolution is crucial for language comprehension.
- Linguistic focus marking can influence interpretation.
- Understanding how children process ambiguous pronouns is important.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if adults and children use linguistic focus devices to resolve ambiguous pronouns.
- To examine the role of prosodic focus and clefting in pronoun interpretation.
- To compare adult and child processing of focus cues.
Main Methods:
- Visual world eye-tracking experiment.
- Participants (adults and children) listened to English dialogues with ambiguous pronouns.
- Four focus conditions: subject focus, object focus, with or without clefting, and a reference condition.
Main Results:
- Adults' online processing showed prosodic focus enhanced subject preference and overrode it with object focus.
- Children's processing was also influenced by prosodic marking, with differences from adults.
- Children's performance interacted with memory and language skills.
Conclusions:
- Linguistic focus, particularly prosody, influences online pronoun resolution in adults and children.
- Subjecthood and first mention dominate offline interpretation when focus cues conflict.
- Children's pronoun resolution is complex and modulated by cognitive factors.
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