Friday, June 25, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Cognitive Science of Language Group
Tiana Simovic (Ph.D., Department of Psychology): "What is the role of antecedent semantics in pronoun resolution?"
Pronoun resolution involves linking semantically impoverished expressions to entities in the comprehender's mental model of discourse. These entities have often been previously mentioned and are characterized as 'linguistic antecedents'. Past work has shown that pronouns need not 'match' antecedents with the same surface form (e.g., "I need a knife, where do you keep them?"), yet the notion of retrieval is often evoked in psychological frameworks. So, what exactly is the content of the relevant mental models? In this study, I explore whether the semantics of antecedent expressions are retrieved during real-time pronoun interpretation. Most generally, the results show that antecedent semantics are not relied on in any direct way, suggesting that frameworks that are less grounded in memory mechanisms may hold greater explanatory promise.
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