Jennifer J. Venditti,1 Matthew Stone,2 Preetham Nanda2 & Paul Tepper2
1 University of Pennsylvania, 2 Rutgers University
A number of studies have observed that pronouns uttered with intonational prominence are interpreted as shifting attention from the most salient entity in the discourse context to some other less salient entity [e.g., 1,2,3]. For example, in the spoken utterance "John hit Bill, then HE hit George", listeners agree that the accented "HE" refers to the less salient "Bill". While this judgment has been discussed numerous times in the literature, the majority of previous studies have relied on introspective or off-line judgments, and have focused on interpretation in strictly parallel clausal sequences [e.g., 1,2]. In the present study, we document the on-line interpretation of accented pronouns using eye-tracking, and investigate contexts differing in the type of discourse relations which hold among adjacent utterances.
Subjects were presented with a visual scene depicting all male (animal) characters involved in some joint action. Subjects viewed the scene while listening to a short discourse about the scene, and were asked to 'follow along'. Two types of discourses were examined: one in which a 'resemblance' discourse relation holds between sequential utterances (e.g., (1), see full details in [4]), versus one in which an 'occasion' relation holds (e.g., (2)). (Only the pre-target and target utterances are shown here. See [5] for full details.) In both contexts, the lion (N1) is more salient than the alligator (N2) in the pre-target utterance, predicting that accented "HE" will be taken to refer to N2 in both cases.
(1) The lion hit the alligator with a long wooden rake. Then HE hit the duck. (relation = resemblance)
(2) The lion put a bucket of soapy water next to the alligator near the front of the car. Then HE got out some sponges. (relation = occasion)
Results show that both N1 and N2 are fixated upon hearing the accented pronoun. While the two referents compete initially, preference for one referent over the other is observed as the verb and subsequent information is encountered. In sequences in which the 'resemblance' relation can be identified at the verb (due to the verb being identical across utterances), a preference for N2 is observed, and fixations on N1 drop off. In contrast, in sequences in which the resemblance relation is not identified at the verb and thus the (default) 'occasion' relation is inferred, we observe an emerging preference for N1 instead (though there is still some competition from N2 throughout the utterance).
We propose an account of on-line accented pronoun interpretation in which the contrast set containing both referents is initially evoked immediately upon hearing the narrow focus pitch accent on the pronoun, and then preference is revised based on subsequent propositional information supplied by the predicate. Interpretation is driven by the identification of the discourse relations among the adjacent utterances.
References
[1] Akmajian, A., & R. Jackendoff (1970). Coreferentiality and stress. Linguistic Inquiry, 1: 124-126.
[2] Smyth, R. (1994). Grammatical determinants of ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 23: 197-229.
[3] Kameyama, M. (1999). Stressed and unstressed pronouns: Complementary preferences. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, pp. 306-321. Cambridge University Press.
[4] Kehler, A. (2001). Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar. CSLI Publications.
[5] Venditti, J. J., M. Stone, P. Nanda, & P. Tepper (2001). Toward an account of accented pronoun interpretation in discourse context: Evidence from eye-tracking. Technical Report, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.