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Discourse models, pronoun resolution, and the implicit causality of verbs
G McKoon1, S B Greene, R Ratcliff
1Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|September 1, 1993
Summary
Interpersonal verbs like "admire" make one person the focus, aiding pronoun understanding in subsequent sentences. This study shows how verb structure influences comprehension and pronoun resolution in causal reasoning.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Interpersonal verbs (e.g., admire, amaze) link a reactor to an initiator.
- These verbs influence how information is processed and represented in discourse.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how interpersonal verbs affect the accessibility of entities in a comprehender's mental model.
- To determine if verb-induced accessibility aids pronoun resolution in causal clauses.
Main Methods:
- Experimental design involving reading comprehension tasks.
- Measurement of reaction times for character name recognition following pronoun-referent clauses.
- Manipulation of verb type and causal structure.
Main Results:
- Participants recognized character names faster when pronouns in a "because" clause referred to the initiator of an interpersonal verb.
- Verb causality and the presence of "because" were crucial for this effect.
- This supports the hypothesis that interpersonal verbs enhance initiator accessibility.
Conclusions:
- Interpersonal verbs prime the initiator, improving pronoun resolution in subsequent causal contexts.
- Linguistic structures, particularly verb semantics and causal connectives, significantly impact cognitive processing and discourse representation.
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