R Hendrick | Search PubMed

PubMed2000

Language comprehension and probe-list memory.

Experiments were performed using probe-word recognition methodology in which participants read sentences that were presented 1 word at a time and were then shown a probe word and had to make a speeded response indicating whether the word had occurred in the sentence. One experiment showed that response times to probe words increased with the size of the set of candidate probes. The other experiments showed that the effects caused by name repetition in circumstances in which the repeated name was co-referential also occurred when the repeated name was not co-referential and when the order of words in a sentence was scrambled. The results suggest that responses in the task can be based on probe-list memory, a mental representation created to keep track of those words that the participant believes are likely to be probed, and that the use of the task to make inferences about language comprehension should be accompanied by controls ruling out such strategies.

Adult↗

PubMed1997

Intuitive knowledge of linguistic co-reference.

The research reported here is a systematic investigation of what competent, native speakers of English, native to contemporary syntactic theory, judge to be grammatically acceptable patterns of co-reference involving names and pronouns. Its central goal is the specification of syntactic factors that influence co-reference within and between sentences. The results show that naive subjects have consistent intuitions of grammaticality that agree with some principles of contemporary binding theory. The results also show that naive subjects diverge substantially from syntactic theorists in other judgments of grammaticality. In particular, subjects have strong intuitions that reflexives and pronouns are in complementary distribution, a fact that supports contemporary syntactic theory. Beyond that domain, subjects' judgments of co-reference in name-pronoun, name-name, and pronoun-name sequences are systematically influenced by syntactic structure in ways that are not consistent with syntactic theory. Co-reference in name-pronoun sequences is generally quite acceptable but becomes more acceptable as the syntactic prominence of the name increases. Co-reference in name-name sequences is only moderately acceptable and becomes less acceptable as the syntactic prominence of the first name increases. Co-reference in pronoun-name sequences is generally unacceptable and is only weakly influenced by the kinds of syntactic prominence that affect other relations of co-reference. We account for these results through the elaboration of a model of the process by which syntactic representations are mapped onto a representation of discourse capable of expressing generalizations about co-reference both intra-sententially and inter-sententially.

Humans↗