Bridging Inferences and Reference Management: Evidence from an Experimental Investigation in Catalan and Russian

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Comparative Linguistics

Background:

• Articles play a crucial role in noun phrase interpretation in many languages.
• Understanding how speakers of languages with and without articles handle nominal reference is key to linguistic theory.
• Previous research has explored article usage, but cross-linguistic comparisons in specific discourse contexts are less common.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the choice of nominal forms in Catalan (a language with articles) versus Russian (a language without articles).
• To examine how native speakers of these languages utilize grammatical and world knowledge in discourse comprehension.
• To compare preferences for nominal forms when referring to single versus multiple disjoint entities.

Main Methods:

• An experimental study involving naturalness judgment tasks.
• Participants included native speakers of Catalan and Russian.
• Analysis focused on noun phrase (NP) choices in bridging contexts.

Main Results:

• Catalan speakers adjust definite/indefinite NP usage based on contextual information for unique interpretation.
• Russian speakers default to bare nominals when referring to single entities.
• Both language groups prefer combinations of indefinite NPs when referring to two disjoint entities, using specific markers like 'altre' (Catalan) and 'drugoj' (Russian).

Conclusions:

• Speaker preferences for nominal forms are influenced by both grammatical knowledge (articles, specific determiners) and discourse-level information (accessibility, uniqueness).
• Cross-linguistic differences in article systems shape distinct strategies for nominal reference.
• The study highlights the interplay between lexical items, grammatical structures, and cognitive processes in language use.