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Showing posts with label pronouns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pronouns. Show all posts
Findings: GamesWithWords.org at DETEC2013
I recently returned from the inaugural Discourse Expectations: Theoretical, Experimental, and Computational Perspectives workshop, where I presented a talk ("Three myths about implicit causality") which ties together a lot of the pronoun research that I have been doing over the last few years, including results from several GamesWithWords.org experiments (PronounSleuth, That Kind of Person, and Find the Dax).
Findings: The Role of World Knowledge in Pronoun Interpretation
A few months ago, I posted the results of That Kind of Person. This was the final experiment in a paper on pronoun interpretation, a paper which is now in press. You can find a PDF of the accepted version here.
How it Began
Isaac Asimov famously observed that "the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" That quote describes this project fairly well. The project grew out of a norming study. Norming studies aren't really even real experiments -- they are mini experiments used to choose stimuli.
I was designing an ERP ("brain wave") study of pronoun processing. A group in Europe had published a paper using ERPs to look at a well-known phenomenon in pronoun interpretation, one which has been discussed a lot on this blog, in which pronoun interpretation clearly depends on context:
(1) Sally frightens Mary because she...
(2) Sally likes Mary because she...
Most people think that "she" refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). This seems to be a function of the verbs in (1-2), since that's all that's different between the sentences, and in fact other verbs also affect pronoun interpretation. We wanted to follow up some of the previous ERP work, and we were just choosing sentences. You get nice big ERP effects (that is, big changes in the brain waves) when something is surprising, so people often compare sentences with unexpected words to those with expected words, which is what this previous group had done:
(3) Sally frightens Bill because she...
(4) Bill frightens Sally because she...
You should get the sense that the pronoun "she" is a bit more surprising in (4) than in (3). Comparing these sentences to (1-2) should make it clear why this is.
The Twist
A number of authors argued that what is going on is that these sentences (1-4) introduce an explanation ("because..."). As you are reading or listening to the sentence, you think through typical causes of the event in question (frightening, liking, etc.) and so come up with a guess as to who is going to be mentioned in the explanation. More good explanations of an instance of frightening involve the frightener than the frightenee, and more good explanations of an instance of liking involve the like-ee than the liker.
The authors supported the argument by pointing to studies showing that what you know about the participants in the event matters. In general, you might think that in any given event involving a king and a butler, kings are more likely to be responsible for the event simply because kings have more power. So in the following sentence, you might interpret the pronoun as referring to the king even though it goes against the "typical" pattern for frighten (preferring explanations involve the frightener).
(5) The butler frightened the king because...
What got people particularly excited about this is that it all has to happen very fast. Studies have shown that you can interpret the pronoun in such sentences in a fraction of a second. If you can do this based on a complex inference about who is likely to do what, that's very impressive and puts strong constraints on our theory of language.
The Twist
A number of authors argued that what is going on is that these sentences (1-4) introduce an explanation ("because..."). As you are reading or listening to the sentence, you think through typical causes of the event in question (frightening, liking, etc.) and so come up with a guess as to who is going to be mentioned in the explanation. More good explanations of an instance of frightening involve the frightener than the frightenee, and more good explanations of an instance of liking involve the like-ee than the liker.
The authors supported the argument by pointing to studies showing that what you know about the participants in the event matters. In general, you might think that in any given event involving a king and a butler, kings are more likely to be responsible for the event simply because kings have more power. So in the following sentence, you might interpret the pronoun as referring to the king even though it goes against the "typical" pattern for frighten (preferring explanations involve the frightener).
(5) The butler frightened the king because...
What got people particularly excited about this is that it all has to happen very fast. Studies have shown that you can interpret the pronoun in such sentences in a fraction of a second. If you can do this based on a complex inference about who is likely to do what, that's very impressive and puts strong constraints on our theory of language.
The Problem
I was in the process of designing an ERP experiment to follow up a previous one in Dutch that I wanted to replicate in English. I had created a number of sentences, and we were running a simple experiment in which people rate how "natural" the sentences sound. We were doing this just to make sure none of our sentences were weird, since that -- as already mentioned -- can have been effects on the brain waves, which could swamp any effects of the pronoun. Again, we expected people to rate (4) as less natural than (3); what we wanted to make sure was that people didn't rate both (3) and (4) as pretty odd. We tested a couple hundred such sentences, from which we would pick the best for the study.
I was worried, though, because a number of previous studies had suggested that gender itself might matter. This follows from the claim that who the event participants are matters (e.g., kings vs. butlers). Specifically, a few studies had reported that in a story about a man and a woman, people expect the man to be talked about more than the woman, analogous to expecting references to the king rather than the butler in (5). Was this a confound?
I ran the study anyway, because we would be able to see in the data just how bad the problem was. To my surprise, there was no effect of gender at all. I started looking at the literature more carefully and noticed that several people had similarly failed to find such effects. One paper had found an effect, but it seemed to be present in only a small handful of sentences out of the large number they had tested. I looked into studies that had investigated sentences like (5) and discovered ... that they didn't exist! Rather, the studies researchers had been citing weren't about pronoun interpretation at all but something else. To be fair, some researchers had suggested that there might be a relationship between this other phenomenon and pronoun interpretation, but it had never been shown. I followed up with some experiments seeing whether the king/butler manipulation would affect pronoun interpretation, and it didn't. (For good measure, I also showed that there is little if any relationship between that other phenomenon and pronouns.)
A Different Problem
So it looked like the data upon which much recent work on pronouns is built was either un-replicable or apocryphal. However, the associated theory had become so entrenched, that this was a difficult dataset to publish. I ultimately had to run around a dozen separate experiments in order to convince reviewers that these effects really don't exist (or mostly don't exist -- there do seem to be a tiny percentage of sentences, around 5%, where you can get reliable if very small effects of gender). (A typical paper has 1-4 experiments, so a dozen is a lot. Just in order to keep the paper from growing to an unmanageable length, I combined various experiments together and reported each one as a separate condition of a larger experiment.)
Most of these experiments were run on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but the final one was run at GamesWithWords.org and was announced on this blog (read the results of that specific experiment here). The paper is now in press at Language & Cognitive Processes. You can read the final submitted version here.
Conclusion
So what does all this mean? In many ways, it's a correction to the literature. A lot of theoretical work was built around findings that turned out to be wrong or nonexistent. In particular, the idea that pronoun interpretation involves a lot of very rapid inferences based on your general knowledge about the world. That's not quite the same thing as having a new theory, but we've been exploring some possibilities that no doubt will be talked about more here in the future.
----
Joshua K. Hartshorne (2014). What is implicit causality? Language and Cognitive Processes
I ran the study anyway, because we would be able to see in the data just how bad the problem was. To my surprise, there was no effect of gender at all. I started looking at the literature more carefully and noticed that several people had similarly failed to find such effects. One paper had found an effect, but it seemed to be present in only a small handful of sentences out of the large number they had tested. I looked into studies that had investigated sentences like (5) and discovered ... that they didn't exist! Rather, the studies researchers had been citing weren't about pronoun interpretation at all but something else. To be fair, some researchers had suggested that there might be a relationship between this other phenomenon and pronoun interpretation, but it had never been shown. I followed up with some experiments seeing whether the king/butler manipulation would affect pronoun interpretation, and it didn't. (For good measure, I also showed that there is little if any relationship between that other phenomenon and pronouns.)
A Different Problem
So it looked like the data upon which much recent work on pronouns is built was either un-replicable or apocryphal. However, the associated theory had become so entrenched, that this was a difficult dataset to publish. I ultimately had to run around a dozen separate experiments in order to convince reviewers that these effects really don't exist (or mostly don't exist -- there do seem to be a tiny percentage of sentences, around 5%, where you can get reliable if very small effects of gender). (A typical paper has 1-4 experiments, so a dozen is a lot. Just in order to keep the paper from growing to an unmanageable length, I combined various experiments together and reported each one as a separate condition of a larger experiment.)
Most of these experiments were run on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but the final one was run at GamesWithWords.org and was announced on this blog (read the results of that specific experiment here). The paper is now in press at Language & Cognitive Processes. You can read the final submitted version here.
Conclusion
So what does all this mean? In many ways, it's a correction to the literature. A lot of theoretical work was built around findings that turned out to be wrong or nonexistent. In particular, the idea that pronoun interpretation involves a lot of very rapid inferences based on your general knowledge about the world. That's not quite the same thing as having a new theory, but we've been exploring some possibilities that no doubt will be talked about more here in the future.
----
Findings: That Kind of Person
That Kind of Person is now complete. Many thanks to all who answered the call to participate.
For some time now, I have been studying the effect of context on pronoun interpretation. If words and sentences always meant what they meant regardless of context, linguistics and psycholinguistics would be much easier, and we would have much better computer translation, speech recognition, etc. Unfortunately, the same word (bank) can often mean different things in different contexts (he paddled over to the bank versus he cashed a check at the back).
Pronouns are a great guinea pig for studying the role of context, because they derive almost all their meaning from context (try to define “she” or “he” and compare it to your definition of “Martha Washington” or “George Washington”).
Great Expectations
Recently, a picture has started to emerge, at least in the case pronouns. The basic idea, due mostly to the work of Andrew Kehler at UCSD*, is that our initial interpretation of a pronoun is driven by what we think is likely to be talked about next. If this seems obvious, the dominant theory at the time Kehler started working (Centering Theory and variants) argued that our initial interpretation of the pronoun is that it refers to whatever person or thing is currently most “salient” (what counts as "salient" depends on the version of the theory) -- a hypothesis that also usually strikes folks as obvious.
Kehler's big contribution was articulating theory of discourse structure – that is, how sentences relate to one another – that can be used to fairly accurately predict what people expect to be mentioned next. (If you are interested in these issues and have a little background in linguistics, Kehler's book, Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar is fantastic.) For instance, sometimes one sentence introduces the consequence of another sentence:
(1) John frightened Bill, so he ran away.
Here, the second sentence (or, if you prefer, second clause) describes a consequence of the first sentence. Most likely "he" refers to Bill, because Bill running away would be a reasonable consequence of John frightening him. In contrast, other sentences explain the previous sentence:
(2) John frightened Bill because he is scary.
Here, "he" probably refers to John, since John being scary would be a good explanation of his frightening of Bill.
There are many other types of relationships between sentences, and they have predictable effects on pronoun interpretation. Although Kehler's theory explains a lot, it does not explain, for example, why we think Bill running away is a more likely effect of John frightening Bill than Bill running away.
The role of verbs
In two recent papers, which I discussed on this blog, my colleagues and I argued that verbs play a major role. Verbs -- specifically, the relationship between a verb and its subject and object -- provide a lot of information about events. We drew in particular on one line of theoretical work (usually called "predicate decomposition theory"), which tries to explain how verb meaning can be built out of a few constituent parts. The details aren't important here. What is important is that this theory argues that some verbs specify who the cause of the event was. What we showed was that usually, in sentences like (2), people think the pronoun refers to the person that the verb specifies as the cause. In this case, "frighten" means something like "John caused Bill to be afraid". Remember that "he is scary" is an explanation of "John frightened Bill." Explanations usually refer to causes.
In short, by drawing on independent theories of discourse structure and verb meaning, we were able to predict very well how people will interpret pronouns in various contexts. At least, we could do so in the ones we tried -- there's a lot of work left to be done to fully flesh out this work.
The problem
I have been presenting this work for a while, and I often get the following objection: We already know that verbs can't be doing all (or even much) of the work. The real story, it was argued, is much more complex. Thinking just about the explanation sentences like (2), Pickering and Majid (2007) noted that multiple factors "affect the construction of the event representation, and it is this event representation that is used to infer the cause..." They cite experimental findings argued to show that pronoun interpretation in sentences like (2) depend in complex ways not just on the verb but on what you know about the subject and the object:
It turns out that there was some confusion in the literature. The studies that Pickering and Majid cite in the quote above mostly don't look at pronoun interpretation at all. Most look at a different task:
(3) John frightened Bill.
a. How likely is this because John is the kind of person who frightens people? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
b. How likely is this because Bill is the kind of person people frighten? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Researchers look whether the answer to (a) is greater or less than the answer to (b) to decide who people think caused the event: John or Bill? Much of the literature has assumed that the answer to this question should predict what happens in pronoun sentences like (2), even though this has never been rigorously shown. (Why it hasn't been carefully tested is a bit of a mystery. It is so widely believed to be true that I suspect many folks don't realize that it hasn't been tested. It actually took me several years to pick up on this fact myself.)
I now have a long line of studies showing that there is little relationship between the two tasks. Also, although manipulating who the subject and object are affect the task in (3), I find very little evidence that it affects pronoun interpretation in (2). For instance, compare the following:
(4) a. The king frightened the page because he....
b. The page frightened the king because he....
Everybody agrees that, in general, it is more likely that kings frighten pages than that pages frighten kings, and so if you use these sentences in (3), you get a nice effect of who the subject is. But it doesn't affect pronoun interpretation at all.
This is a serious blow to Pickering and Majid's argument. They argued that pronoun interpretation cannot be all (or mostly) about discourse structure and verb meaning because these interact in complex ways with knowledge about the subject and object (I should add: non-linguistic knowledge. It presumably is not part of the definition of king and page that kings frighten pages but not vice versa, but rather something you learn about the world). If it turns out that this is not the case, then discourse structure + verb meaning may well explain much or all of the phenomenon at hand.
That Kind of Person
That was my argument, anyway, in a paper that I have been shopping around for a couple years now. The difficulty with publishing this paper is that it makes a null argument: you can't find effects of knowledge about the subject and object on pronoun interpretation. In fact, all I can show is that the manipulations I have tried haven't worked, not that no manipulation works (you can't try everything!). So much of the review process has been reviewers suggesting additional experiments and me running them. The latest -- and I hope last -- one was That Kind of Person.
A reviewer very smartly noted that a big difference between (2) and (3) is that (3) asks about the kind of person the subject is and the kind of person the object is, whereas (2) does not. What we are manipulating in our king/page manipulation is, of course, the kind of person the subject is and the kind of person that the object is. So the reviewer suggested the following pronoun task:
(5) a. The king frightened the page because he is the kind of person that...
b. The page frightened the king because he is the kind of person that...
The specific manipulation was one of status. It was argued in the literature that people are more likely to think that high-status folk (kings) caused the event that low-status folk (pages). This does turn out to be true if you use the task in (3), but yet again I found no effect on pronouns, either using sentences like (4) or like (5). (Sorry -- I was going to include a graph, but the results aren't formatted for graphing yet, and it's time for lunch! Maybe when the paper is published...)
Conclusions
I think the result of this work is that it suggests that we really are narrowing in on "the" theory of pronoun interpretation (though there is a lot of work left), a theory in which most of the work is done by discourse structure and verb meaning. This is pretty exciting, because it would be one of the rare cases where we have a reasonably complete theory of how context affects word meaning. It does leave open the question of what the task in (3) is measuring, and why it doesn't match what the pronoun tasks measure. That's still the sticking point in the review. I have a few new ideas, and we'll see what the reviewers say this time around.
----
*Editors at newspapers and magazines usually request that, whenever you introduce a scientist in an article, you state name, institution, and scientific field. The first two are easy, but the last one is hard, particularly when you frequently write about interdisciplinary research (which I do). I wrote about Kehler in an article for Scientific American Mind a while back, and introducing him caused a long debate. His degree is in computer science, he works in a linguistics department, but his work is probably best described as psychology. So what is he?
Just another reason I prefer blogging.
For some time now, I have been studying the effect of context on pronoun interpretation. If words and sentences always meant what they meant regardless of context, linguistics and psycholinguistics would be much easier, and we would have much better computer translation, speech recognition, etc. Unfortunately, the same word (bank) can often mean different things in different contexts (he paddled over to the bank versus he cashed a check at the back).
Pronouns are a great guinea pig for studying the role of context, because they derive almost all their meaning from context (try to define “she” or “he” and compare it to your definition of “Martha Washington” or “George Washington”).
Great Expectations
Recently, a picture has started to emerge, at least in the case pronouns. The basic idea, due mostly to the work of Andrew Kehler at UCSD*, is that our initial interpretation of a pronoun is driven by what we think is likely to be talked about next. If this seems obvious, the dominant theory at the time Kehler started working (Centering Theory and variants) argued that our initial interpretation of the pronoun is that it refers to whatever person or thing is currently most “salient” (what counts as "salient" depends on the version of the theory) -- a hypothesis that also usually strikes folks as obvious.
Kehler's big contribution was articulating theory of discourse structure – that is, how sentences relate to one another – that can be used to fairly accurately predict what people expect to be mentioned next. (If you are interested in these issues and have a little background in linguistics, Kehler's book, Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar is fantastic.) For instance, sometimes one sentence introduces the consequence of another sentence:
(1) John frightened Bill, so he ran away.
Here, the second sentence (or, if you prefer, second clause) describes a consequence of the first sentence. Most likely "he" refers to Bill, because Bill running away would be a reasonable consequence of John frightening him. In contrast, other sentences explain the previous sentence:
(2) John frightened Bill because he is scary.
Here, "he" probably refers to John, since John being scary would be a good explanation of his frightening of Bill.
There are many other types of relationships between sentences, and they have predictable effects on pronoun interpretation. Although Kehler's theory explains a lot, it does not explain, for example, why we think Bill running away is a more likely effect of John frightening Bill than Bill running away.
The role of verbs
In two recent papers, which I discussed on this blog, my colleagues and I argued that verbs play a major role. Verbs -- specifically, the relationship between a verb and its subject and object -- provide a lot of information about events. We drew in particular on one line of theoretical work (usually called "predicate decomposition theory"), which tries to explain how verb meaning can be built out of a few constituent parts. The details aren't important here. What is important is that this theory argues that some verbs specify who the cause of the event was. What we showed was that usually, in sentences like (2), people think the pronoun refers to the person that the verb specifies as the cause. In this case, "frighten" means something like "John caused Bill to be afraid". Remember that "he is scary" is an explanation of "John frightened Bill." Explanations usually refer to causes.
In short, by drawing on independent theories of discourse structure and verb meaning, we were able to predict very well how people will interpret pronouns in various contexts. At least, we could do so in the ones we tried -- there's a lot of work left to be done to fully flesh out this work.
The problem
I have been presenting this work for a while, and I often get the following objection: We already know that verbs can't be doing all (or even much) of the work. The real story, it was argued, is much more complex. Thinking just about the explanation sentences like (2), Pickering and Majid (2007) noted that multiple factors "affect the construction of the event representation, and it is this event representation that is used to infer the cause..." They cite experimental findings argued to show that pronoun interpretation in sentences like (2) depend in complex ways not just on the verb but on what you know about the subject and the object:
In addition, properties of the participants affect implicit causality. Changing the gender (Lafrance, Brownell, & Hahn, 1997), animacy (Corrigan, 1988, 1992), or typicality (Corrigan, 1992; Garvey et al., 1976) of the participants changes the [pronoun interpretation].After hearing this enough times, I started what I thought would be a series of studies to look at how information about the subject and object interact with the verb in real time during sentence comprehension. This project never got off the ground because I couldn't find any such effects. That is, I have now run a number of studies where I manipulate the gender or typicality, etc., of the subject and object, and they have no effect on pronoun interpretation.
It turns out that there was some confusion in the literature. The studies that Pickering and Majid cite in the quote above mostly don't look at pronoun interpretation at all. Most look at a different task:
(3) John frightened Bill.
a. How likely is this because John is the kind of person who frightens people? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
b. How likely is this because Bill is the kind of person people frighten? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Researchers look whether the answer to (a) is greater or less than the answer to (b) to decide who people think caused the event: John or Bill? Much of the literature has assumed that the answer to this question should predict what happens in pronoun sentences like (2), even though this has never been rigorously shown. (Why it hasn't been carefully tested is a bit of a mystery. It is so widely believed to be true that I suspect many folks don't realize that it hasn't been tested. It actually took me several years to pick up on this fact myself.)
I now have a long line of studies showing that there is little relationship between the two tasks. Also, although manipulating who the subject and object are affect the task in (3), I find very little evidence that it affects pronoun interpretation in (2). For instance, compare the following:
(4) a. The king frightened the page because he....
b. The page frightened the king because he....
Everybody agrees that, in general, it is more likely that kings frighten pages than that pages frighten kings, and so if you use these sentences in (3), you get a nice effect of who the subject is. But it doesn't affect pronoun interpretation at all.
This is a serious blow to Pickering and Majid's argument. They argued that pronoun interpretation cannot be all (or mostly) about discourse structure and verb meaning because these interact in complex ways with knowledge about the subject and object (I should add: non-linguistic knowledge. It presumably is not part of the definition of king and page that kings frighten pages but not vice versa, but rather something you learn about the world). If it turns out that this is not the case, then discourse structure + verb meaning may well explain much or all of the phenomenon at hand.
That Kind of Person
That was my argument, anyway, in a paper that I have been shopping around for a couple years now. The difficulty with publishing this paper is that it makes a null argument: you can't find effects of knowledge about the subject and object on pronoun interpretation. In fact, all I can show is that the manipulations I have tried haven't worked, not that no manipulation works (you can't try everything!). So much of the review process has been reviewers suggesting additional experiments and me running them. The latest -- and I hope last -- one was That Kind of Person.
A reviewer very smartly noted that a big difference between (2) and (3) is that (3) asks about the kind of person the subject is and the kind of person the object is, whereas (2) does not. What we are manipulating in our king/page manipulation is, of course, the kind of person the subject is and the kind of person that the object is. So the reviewer suggested the following pronoun task:
(5) a. The king frightened the page because he is the kind of person that...
b. The page frightened the king because he is the kind of person that...
The specific manipulation was one of status. It was argued in the literature that people are more likely to think that high-status folk (kings) caused the event that low-status folk (pages). This does turn out to be true if you use the task in (3), but yet again I found no effect on pronouns, either using sentences like (4) or like (5). (Sorry -- I was going to include a graph, but the results aren't formatted for graphing yet, and it's time for lunch! Maybe when the paper is published...)
Conclusions
I think the result of this work is that it suggests that we really are narrowing in on "the" theory of pronoun interpretation (though there is a lot of work left), a theory in which most of the work is done by discourse structure and verb meaning. This is pretty exciting, because it would be one of the rare cases where we have a reasonably complete theory of how context affects word meaning. It does leave open the question of what the task in (3) is measuring, and why it doesn't match what the pronoun tasks measure. That's still the sticking point in the review. I have a few new ideas, and we'll see what the reviewers say this time around.
----
*Editors at newspapers and magazines usually request that, whenever you introduce a scientist in an article, you state name, institution, and scientific field. The first two are easy, but the last one is hard, particularly when you frequently write about interdisciplinary research (which I do). I wrote about Kehler in an article for Scientific American Mind a while back, and introducing him caused a long debate. His degree is in computer science, he works in a linguistics department, but his work is probably best described as psychology. So what is he?
Just another reason I prefer blogging.
Still testing...
I was hoping to post the results of That Kind of Person today. When I announced the study two weeks ago, I estimated that it would take about two weeks to get enough data. For some reason, traffic on the site plummeted late last week.
So maybe one more week. As soon as I know the results, you will, and since this is (please let it be) the last experiment (#8!) for a paper, I am checking the numbers constantly. Many thanks to those who have already participated (those who haven't, you can find the experiment here; it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes).
So maybe one more week. As soon as I know the results, you will, and since this is (please let it be) the last experiment (#8!) for a paper, I am checking the numbers constantly. Many thanks to those who have already participated (those who haven't, you can find the experiment here; it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes).
Findings: Linguistic Universals in Pronoun Resolution - Episode II
A new paper, based on data collected through GamesWithWords.org, is now in press (click here for the accepted draft). Below is an overview of the paper.
Many of the experiments at GamesWithWords.org have to do with pronouns. I find pronouns interesting because, unlike many other words, the meaning of a pronoun is almost entirely dependent on context. So while "Jane Austen" refers to Jane Austen no matter who says it or when, "I" refers to a different person, depending mostly on who says it (but not entirely: an actor playing a part uses "I" to refer not to himself but to the character he's playing). Things get even hairier when we start looking at other pronouns like "he" and "she". This means that pronouns are a good laboratory animal for investigating how people use context to help interpret language.
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I have spent a lot of time looking at one particular contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s:
(1) Sally frightens Mary because she...
(2) Sally loves Mary because she...
Although the pronoun is ambiguous, most people guess that she refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). That is, the verb used (frightens, loves) seems to affect pronoun resolution. Replace "frightens" and "loves" with other verbs, and what happens to the pronoun depends on the verb: some verbs lead to subject resolutions like frightens, some to object resolutions like loves, and some leave people unsure (that is, they think that either interpretation of the pronoun is equally reasonable).
The question is why. One possibility is that this is some idiosyncratic fact about the verb. Just as you learn that the past tense of walk is walked but the past tense of run is ran, you learn that some verbs lead you to resolve pronouns to the verbs' subject and some the verbs' object (and some verbs have no preference). This was what was tentatively suggested in the original Garvey and Caramazza paper.
Does the meaning of the verb matter?
One of the predictions of this account is that there's nothing necessary about the fact that frightens leads to subject resolutions whereas loves leads to object resolutions, just as there is no deep reason that run's past tense is ran. English could have been different.
Many researchers have suspected that the pronoun effects we see are not accidental; the pronoun effects arise from some fundamental aspect of the meanings of frightens and loves. Even Garvey & Caramazza suspected this, but all the hypotheses they considered they were able to rule out. Recently, using data from GamesWithWords.org, we presented some evidence that this is right. Interestingly, while researchers studying pronouns were busy trying to come up with some theory of verb meaning that would explain the pronoun effects, many semanticists were independently busy trying to explain verb meaning for entirely different reasons. Usually, they are interested in explaining things like verb alternations. So, for instance, they might notice that verbs for which the subject experiences an emotion about the object:
(3) Mary likes/loves/hates/fears John.
can take "that" complements:
(4) Mary likes/loves/hates/fears that John climbs mountains.
However, verbs for which the object experiences an emotion caused by the subject do not:
(5) Mary pleases/delights/angers/frightens John.
(6) *Mary pleases/delights/angers/frightens that John climbs mountains.
[The asterisk means that the sentence is ill-formed in English.]
Linguists working on these problems have put together lists of verbs, all of which have similar meanings and which can be used in the same way. (VerbNet is the most comprehensive of these.) Notice that in this particular work, "please" and "frighten" end up in the same group as each other and a different group from "like" and "fear" are in a different one: Even though "frighten" and "fear" are similar in terms of the emotion they describe, they have a very different structure in terms of who -- the subject or the object -- feels the emotion.
We took one such list of verb classes and showed that it explained the pronoun effect quite well: Verbs that were in the same meaning class had the same pronoun effect. This suggests that meaning is what is driving the pronoun effect.
Or does it?
If the pronoun effect is driven by the meaning of a verb, then it shouldn't matter what language that verb is in. If you have two verbs in two languages with the same meaning, they should both show the same pronoun effect.
We aren't the first people to have thought of this. As early as 1983, Brown and Fish compared English and Mandarin. The most comprehensive study so far is probably Goikoetxea, Pascual and Ancha's mammoth study of Spanish verbs. The problem was determining identifying cross-linguistic synonyms. Does the Spanish word asustar mean frighten, scare, or terrify?
Once we showed that frighten, scare and terrify all have the same pronoun effect in English, the problem disappeared. It no longer mattered what the exact translation of asustar or any other word was: Given that entire classes of verbs in English have the same pronoun effect, all we needed to do was find verbs in other languages that fit into the same class.
We focused on transitive verbs of emotion. These are the two classes already introduced: those where the subject experiences the emotion (like/love/hate/fear) and those where the object does (please/delight/anger/frighten) (note that there are quite a few of both types of verbs). We collected new data in Japanese, Mandarin and Russian (the Japanese and Russian studies were run at GamesWithWords.org and/or its predecessor, CogLangLab.org) and re-analyzed published data from English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish.
You can read the paper and see the rest of the graphs here. In the future, we would like to test more different kinds of verbs and more languages, but the results so far are striking, and suggest that the pronoun effect is caused by what verbs mean, not some idiosyncratic grammatical feature of the language. There is still a lot to be worked out, though. For instance, we're now pretty sure that some component of meaning is relevant to the pronoun effect, but which component and why?
------------
Hartshorne, J., and Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35 DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2012.689305
Goikoetxea, E., Pascual, G., and Acha, J. (2008). Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish Behavior Research Methods, 40 (3), 760-772 DOI: 10.3758/BRM.40.3.760
Garvery, C., and Caramazza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs Linguistic Inquiry, 5 (3), 459-464
Many of the experiments at GamesWithWords.org have to do with pronouns. I find pronouns interesting because, unlike many other words, the meaning of a pronoun is almost entirely dependent on context. So while "Jane Austen" refers to Jane Austen no matter who says it or when, "I" refers to a different person, depending mostly on who says it (but not entirely: an actor playing a part uses "I" to refer not to himself but to the character he's playing). Things get even hairier when we start looking at other pronouns like "he" and "she". This means that pronouns are a good laboratory animal for investigating how people use context to help interpret language.
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Mice make lousy laboratory animals for studying the role of context in language.
Pronouns are better.
I have spent a lot of time looking at one particular contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s:
(1) Sally frightens Mary because she...
(2) Sally loves Mary because she...
Although the pronoun is ambiguous, most people guess that she refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). That is, the verb used (frightens, loves) seems to affect pronoun resolution. Replace "frightens" and "loves" with other verbs, and what happens to the pronoun depends on the verb: some verbs lead to subject resolutions like frightens, some to object resolutions like loves, and some leave people unsure (that is, they think that either interpretation of the pronoun is equally reasonable).
The question is why. One possibility is that this is some idiosyncratic fact about the verb. Just as you learn that the past tense of walk is walked but the past tense of run is ran, you learn that some verbs lead you to resolve pronouns to the verbs' subject and some the verbs' object (and some verbs have no preference). This was what was tentatively suggested in the original Garvey and Caramazza paper.
Does the meaning of the verb matter?
One of the predictions of this account is that there's nothing necessary about the fact that frightens leads to subject resolutions whereas loves leads to object resolutions, just as there is no deep reason that run's past tense is ran. English could have been different.
Many researchers have suspected that the pronoun effects we see are not accidental; the pronoun effects arise from some fundamental aspect of the meanings of frightens and loves. Even Garvey & Caramazza suspected this, but all the hypotheses they considered they were able to rule out. Recently, using data from GamesWithWords.org, we presented some evidence that this is right. Interestingly, while researchers studying pronouns were busy trying to come up with some theory of verb meaning that would explain the pronoun effects, many semanticists were independently busy trying to explain verb meaning for entirely different reasons. Usually, they are interested in explaining things like verb alternations. So, for instance, they might notice that verbs for which the subject experiences an emotion about the object:
(3) Mary likes/loves/hates/fears John.
can take "that" complements:
(4) Mary likes/loves/hates/fears that John climbs mountains.
However, verbs for which the object experiences an emotion caused by the subject do not:
(5) Mary pleases/delights/angers/frightens John.
(6) *Mary pleases/delights/angers/frightens that John climbs mountains.
[The asterisk means that the sentence is ill-formed in English.]
Linguists working on these problems have put together lists of verbs, all of which have similar meanings and which can be used in the same way. (VerbNet is the most comprehensive of these.) Notice that in this particular work, "please" and "frighten" end up in the same group as each other and a different group from "like" and "fear" are in a different one: Even though "frighten" and "fear" are similar in terms of the emotion they describe, they have a very different structure in terms of who -- the subject or the object -- feels the emotion.
We took one such list of verb classes and showed that it explained the pronoun effect quite well: Verbs that were in the same meaning class had the same pronoun effect. This suggests that meaning is what is driving the pronoun effect.
Or does it?
If the pronoun effect is driven by the meaning of a verb, then it shouldn't matter what language that verb is in. If you have two verbs in two languages with the same meaning, they should both show the same pronoun effect.
We aren't the first people to have thought of this. As early as 1983, Brown and Fish compared English and Mandarin. The most comprehensive study so far is probably Goikoetxea, Pascual and Ancha's mammoth study of Spanish verbs. The problem was determining identifying cross-linguistic synonyms. Does the Spanish word asustar mean frighten, scare, or terrify?
Is this orangutan scared, frightened or terrified? Does it matter?
Once we showed that frighten, scare and terrify all have the same pronoun effect in English, the problem disappeared. It no longer mattered what the exact translation of asustar or any other word was: Given that entire classes of verbs in English have the same pronoun effect, all we needed to do was find verbs in other languages that fit into the same class.
We focused on transitive verbs of emotion. These are the two classes already introduced: those where the subject experiences the emotion (like/love/hate/fear) and those where the object does (please/delight/anger/frighten) (note that there are quite a few of both types of verbs). We collected new data in Japanese, Mandarin and Russian (the Japanese and Russian studies were run at GamesWithWords.org and/or its predecessor, CogLangLab.org) and re-analyzed published data from English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish.
Results for English verbs (above). "Experiencer-Subject" verbs are the ones like "fear" and "Experiencer-Object" are the ones like "frighten". You can see that people were consistently more likely to think that the pronoun in sentences like (1-2) referred to the subject of Experiencer-Object verbs than Experiencer-Subject verbs.
The results are the same for Mandarin (above). There aren't as many dots because we didn't test as many of the verbs in Mandarin, but the pattern is striking.
The Dutch results (above). The pattern is again the same. Again, Dutch has more of these verb, but the study we re-analyzed had only tested a few of them.
------------
Hartshorne, J., and Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35 DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2012.689305
Goikoetxea, E., Pascual, G., and Acha, J. (2008). Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish Behavior Research Methods, 40 (3), 760-772 DOI: 10.3758/BRM.40.3.760
Roger Brown and Deborah Fish (1983). Are there universal schemas of psychological causality? Archives de Psychologie, 51, 145-153
New Experiment: That Kind of Person
I just got back reviews on one of the pronoun papers. Although the paper already had seven experiments, they want two more. The worst part about it is that they are right.
Luckily, the experiment they asked for can be done online. It takes about 5 minutes. Native English speakers preferred (though I look at all data).
That Kind of Person (takes about 5 minutes)
My target is to post the results for this and the seven previous experiments in 2 weeks ... if I get enough participants quickly. Thank you in advance to everyone who participates.
Luckily, the experiment they asked for can be done online. It takes about 5 minutes. Native English speakers preferred (though I look at all data).
That Kind of Person (takes about 5 minutes)
My target is to post the results for this and the seven previous experiments in 2 weeks ... if I get enough participants quickly. Thank you in advance to everyone who participates.
Boston University Conference on Language Development: Day 1
This year marks my 7th straight BUCLD. BUCLD is the major yearly language acquisition conference. (IASCL is the other sizable language acquisition conference, but meets only every three years; it is also somewhat more international than BUCLD and the Empiricist contingent is a bit larger, whereas BUCLD is *relatively* Nativist).
NOTE I'm typing this up during a break at the conference, so I've spent less time making these notes accessible to the general public than usual. Some parts may be opaque to you if you don't know the general subject matter. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
Day 1 (Friday, Nov. 2)
What does eyetracking tell us about kid's sentence processing
The conference got off to a great start with Jesse Snedeker's 9am talk, "Negation in children's online language comprehension" (for those who don't know, there are 3 talks at any given time; no doubt the other two 9am talks were good, but I wasn't at them). I was actually more interested in the introduction than the conclusion. Over the last 15 years, the Visual World Paradigm has come to dominate how we study children's language processing. Here is how I usually describe the paradigm to participants in my studies: "People typically look at what is being talked about. So if I talk about the window, you'll probably automatically look at the window. So we can measure what people look at as they listen to sentences to get a sense of what they think the sentence is about at any given time."
Snedeker's thesis was that we actually don't know what part of language comprehension this paradigm measures. Does it measure your interpretation of individual words or of the sentence as a whole? One of the things about language is that words have meanings by themselves, but when combined into sentences, new meanings arise that aren't part of any individual word. So "book" is a physical object, but if I say "The author started the book", you likely interpret "book" as something closer to an activity ("writing the book") than a physical object.
Because the Visual World Paradigm is used extensively by sentence-comprehension people (like me), we hope that it measures sentence comprehension, not just individual words. Snedeker walked through many of the classic results from the Visual World Paradigm and argued that they are consistent with the possibility that the Visual World Paradigm just measures word meaning, not sentence meaning.
She then presented a project showing that, at least in some cases, the Visual World Paradigm is sensitive to sentence meaning, which she did by looking at negation. In "John broke the plate", we are talking about a broken plate, where as in "John didn't break the plate", we are not. So negation completely changes the meaning of the sentence. She told participants stories about different objects while the participants looked at pictures of those objects on a computer screen (the screen of an automatic eyetracker, which can tell where the participant is looking). For example, the story might be about a clumsy child who was carrying dishes around and broke some of them but not others (and so, on the screen, there was a picture of a broken plate and a picture of a not-broken plate). She found that adults and even children as young as three years old look at the broken plate when they heard "John broke the plate" but at the not-broken plate when they heard "John didn't break the plate", and they did so very quickly ... which is what you would expect if eyetracking was measuring your current interpretation of the sentence rather than just your current interpretation of the individual words (in which case, when you hear the word "plate", either plate will do).
(This work was joint work with Miseon Lee -- a collaborator of mine -- Tracy Brookhyser and Matthew Jiang.)
The First Mention Effect
W. Quin Yow of Singapore University of Technology and Design presented a project looking at pronoun interpretation (a topic close to my heart). She looked at sentences in which adults typically interpret the pronoun as referring to the previous subject (these are not the so-called "implicit causality" sentences I discuss most on this blog):
Yow compared monolingual English-speaking four year-olds and bilingual English-speaking four year-olds (their "other" language differed from kid to kid). While only the bilinguals showed a statistically significant first-mention effect, the monolingual kids were only just barely not above chance and almost identical to the monolinguals. While the first-mention effects she saw were weaker than what I saw in my own work, her kids were slightly younger (four year-olds instead of five year-olds).
The additional twist she added was that, in some conditions, the experimenter pointed to one of the characters in the story at the moment she uttered the pronoun. This had a strong effect on how adults and bilingual children interpreted the pronoun; the effect was weaker or monolingual children, but I couldn't tell whether it was significantly weaker (with only 16 kids per group, a certain amount of variability between groups is expected).
In general, I interpret this as more evidence that young children do have (weak) first-mention biases. And it is nice to have one's results replicated.
Iconicity in sign language
Rachel Magid, a student of Jennie Pyers at Wellesley College, presented work on children's acquisition of sign language. Some signs are "iconic" in that they resemble the thing being referred to: for instance, miming swinging a hammer as the sign for "hammer" (I remember this example from the talk, but I do not remember whether that's an actual sign in ASL or any other sign language). Spoken languages have iconic words as well, such as "bark", which both means and sort of sounds like the sound a dog makes. This brings up an important point: iconic words/signs resemble the things they refer to, but not perfectly, and in fact it is often difficult to guess what they refer to, though once it has been explained to you, the relationship is obvious.
The big result was that four year-olds hearing children found it easier to learn iconic than non-iconic signs, whereas three year-olds did not. Similar results were found for deaf children (though if memory serves, the three year-old deaf children were trending towards doing better with iconic signs, though the number of subjects -- 9 deaf three year-olds -- was too small to say much about it).
Why care? There are those who think that early sign language acquisition -- and presumably the creation of sign languages themselves -- derives from imitation and mimicry (basically, sign languages and sign language acquisition start as a game of charades). If so, then you would expect those signs that are most related to imitation/mimicry to be the easiest to learn. However, the youngest children -- even deaf children who have learned a fair amount of sign language -- don't find them especially easy to learn. Why older children and adults *do* find them easier to learn still requires an explanation, though .
[Note: This is my interpretation of the work. Whether Magid and Pyers would endorse the last paragraph, I am not sure.]
Briefly-mentioned
Daniele Panizza (another occasional collaborator of mine) presented work done with a number of folks, including Stephen Crain, on 3-5 year-olds' interpretations of numbers. The question is whether young children understand reversals of entailment scales. So, if you say "John has two butterflies", that means that you do not have three, whereas saying "If John has two butterflies, give him a sticker" means that if he has two OR MORE butterflies, give him a sticker [NOTE, even adults find this "at least two" reading to be a bit iffy; the phenomenon is that they find the "at least two" reading much better in a downward-entailing context like a conditional MUCH BETTER than in a normal declarative]. Interestingly, another colleague and I had spent a good part of the last week wondering whether children that age understood this, so we were happy to learn the answer so quickly: they do.
In the next talk, Einat Shetreet presented work with Julia Reading, Nadine Gaab and Gennaro Chierchia also looking at entailment scales, but with scalar quantifiers rather than numerals. Adults generally think "John ate some of the cookies" means that he did not eat all of them (some = some but not all), whereas "John didn't eat all of the cookies" means that he ate some of them (not all = some). They found that six year olds also get both of these inferences, which is consistent with the just-mentioned Panizza study.
These studies may seem esoteric but get at recent theories of scalar implicature. Basically, theories of scalar implicature have been getting much more complex recently, suggesting that this relatively simple phenomenon involves many moving pieces. Interestingly, children are very bad at scalar implicature (even up through the early elementary years, children are much less likely to treat "some" as meaning "some but not all", so they'll accept sentences like "Some elephants have trunks" as reasonable sentences, whereas adults tend to find such sentences quite odd). So the race is on to figure out which of the many component parts of scalar implicature are the limiting step in early language acquisition.
There were many other good talks on the first day; these merely represent those for which I have the most extensive notes.
NOTE I'm typing this up during a break at the conference, so I've spent less time making these notes accessible to the general public than usual. Some parts may be opaque to you if you don't know the general subject matter. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
Day 1 (Friday, Nov. 2)
What does eyetracking tell us about kid's sentence processing
The conference got off to a great start with Jesse Snedeker's 9am talk, "Negation in children's online language comprehension" (for those who don't know, there are 3 talks at any given time; no doubt the other two 9am talks were good, but I wasn't at them). I was actually more interested in the introduction than the conclusion. Over the last 15 years, the Visual World Paradigm has come to dominate how we study children's language processing. Here is how I usually describe the paradigm to participants in my studies: "People typically look at what is being talked about. So if I talk about the window, you'll probably automatically look at the window. So we can measure what people look at as they listen to sentences to get a sense of what they think the sentence is about at any given time."
Snedeker's thesis was that we actually don't know what part of language comprehension this paradigm measures. Does it measure your interpretation of individual words or of the sentence as a whole? One of the things about language is that words have meanings by themselves, but when combined into sentences, new meanings arise that aren't part of any individual word. So "book" is a physical object, but if I say "The author started the book", you likely interpret "book" as something closer to an activity ("writing the book") than a physical object.
Because the Visual World Paradigm is used extensively by sentence-comprehension people (like me), we hope that it measures sentence comprehension, not just individual words. Snedeker walked through many of the classic results from the Visual World Paradigm and argued that they are consistent with the possibility that the Visual World Paradigm just measures word meaning, not sentence meaning.
She then presented a project showing that, at least in some cases, the Visual World Paradigm is sensitive to sentence meaning, which she did by looking at negation. In "John broke the plate", we are talking about a broken plate, where as in "John didn't break the plate", we are not. So negation completely changes the meaning of the sentence. She told participants stories about different objects while the participants looked at pictures of those objects on a computer screen (the screen of an automatic eyetracker, which can tell where the participant is looking). For example, the story might be about a clumsy child who was carrying dishes around and broke some of them but not others (and so, on the screen, there was a picture of a broken plate and a picture of a not-broken plate). She found that adults and even children as young as three years old look at the broken plate when they heard "John broke the plate" but at the not-broken plate when they heard "John didn't break the plate", and they did so very quickly ... which is what you would expect if eyetracking was measuring your current interpretation of the sentence rather than just your current interpretation of the individual words (in which case, when you hear the word "plate", either plate will do).
(This work was joint work with Miseon Lee -- a collaborator of mine -- Tracy Brookhyser and Matthew Jiang.)
The First Mention Effect
W. Quin Yow of Singapore University of Technology and Design presented a project looking at pronoun interpretation (a topic close to my heart). She looked at sentences in which adults typically interpret the pronoun as referring to the previous subject (these are not the so-called "implicit causality" sentences I discuss most on this blog):
Miss Owl is going out with Miss Ducky. She wants her bag.She found, as usual, a strong preference for "she" to refer to Miss Owl in this (and similar) sentences. There is one older study that did not find such a preference in children roughly 4-6 years old, but several other studies have found evidence of (weak) first-mention effects in such sentences, including [shameless self-plug] work I presented at BUCLD two years ago.
Yow compared monolingual English-speaking four year-olds and bilingual English-speaking four year-olds (their "other" language differed from kid to kid). While only the bilinguals showed a statistically significant first-mention effect, the monolingual kids were only just barely not above chance and almost identical to the monolinguals. While the first-mention effects she saw were weaker than what I saw in my own work, her kids were slightly younger (four year-olds instead of five year-olds).
The additional twist she added was that, in some conditions, the experimenter pointed to one of the characters in the story at the moment she uttered the pronoun. This had a strong effect on how adults and bilingual children interpreted the pronoun; the effect was weaker or monolingual children, but I couldn't tell whether it was significantly weaker (with only 16 kids per group, a certain amount of variability between groups is expected).
In general, I interpret this as more evidence that young children do have (weak) first-mention biases. And it is nice to have one's results replicated.
Iconicity in sign language
Rachel Magid, a student of Jennie Pyers at Wellesley College, presented work on children's acquisition of sign language. Some signs are "iconic" in that they resemble the thing being referred to: for instance, miming swinging a hammer as the sign for "hammer" (I remember this example from the talk, but I do not remember whether that's an actual sign in ASL or any other sign language). Spoken languages have iconic words as well, such as "bark", which both means and sort of sounds like the sound a dog makes. This brings up an important point: iconic words/signs resemble the things they refer to, but not perfectly, and in fact it is often difficult to guess what they refer to, though once it has been explained to you, the relationship is obvious.
The big result was that four year-olds hearing children found it easier to learn iconic than non-iconic signs, whereas three year-olds did not. Similar results were found for deaf children (though if memory serves, the three year-old deaf children were trending towards doing better with iconic signs, though the number of subjects -- 9 deaf three year-olds -- was too small to say much about it).
Why care? There are those who think that early sign language acquisition -- and presumably the creation of sign languages themselves -- derives from imitation and mimicry (basically, sign languages and sign language acquisition start as a game of charades). If so, then you would expect those signs that are most related to imitation/mimicry to be the easiest to learn. However, the youngest children -- even deaf children who have learned a fair amount of sign language -- don't find them especially easy to learn. Why older children and adults *do* find them easier to learn still requires an explanation, though .
[Note: This is my interpretation of the work. Whether Magid and Pyers would endorse the last paragraph, I am not sure.]
Briefly-mentioned
Daniele Panizza (another occasional collaborator of mine) presented work done with a number of folks, including Stephen Crain, on 3-5 year-olds' interpretations of numbers. The question is whether young children understand reversals of entailment scales. So, if you say "John has two butterflies", that means that you do not have three, whereas saying "If John has two butterflies, give him a sticker" means that if he has two OR MORE butterflies, give him a sticker [NOTE, even adults find this "at least two" reading to be a bit iffy; the phenomenon is that they find the "at least two" reading much better in a downward-entailing context like a conditional MUCH BETTER than in a normal declarative]. Interestingly, another colleague and I had spent a good part of the last week wondering whether children that age understood this, so we were happy to learn the answer so quickly: they do.
In the next talk, Einat Shetreet presented work with Julia Reading, Nadine Gaab and Gennaro Chierchia also looking at entailment scales, but with scalar quantifiers rather than numerals. Adults generally think "John ate some of the cookies" means that he did not eat all of them (some = some but not all), whereas "John didn't eat all of the cookies" means that he ate some of them (not all = some). They found that six year olds also get both of these inferences, which is consistent with the just-mentioned Panizza study.
These studies may seem esoteric but get at recent theories of scalar implicature. Basically, theories of scalar implicature have been getting much more complex recently, suggesting that this relatively simple phenomenon involves many moving pieces. Interestingly, children are very bad at scalar implicature (even up through the early elementary years, children are much less likely to treat "some" as meaning "some but not all", so they'll accept sentences like "Some elephants have trunks" as reasonable sentences, whereas adults tend to find such sentences quite odd). So the race is on to figure out which of the many component parts of scalar implicature are the limiting step in early language acquisition.
There were many other good talks on the first day; these merely represent those for which I have the most extensive notes.
Findings: What do verbs have to do with pronouns?
A new paper, based on data collected through GamesWithWords.org, is now in press (click here for a pre-print). Below is an overview of this paper.
Unlike a proper name (Jane Austen), a pronoun (she) can refer to a different person just about every time it is uttered. While we occasionally get bogged down in conversation trying to interpret a pronoun (Wait! Who are you talking about?), for the most part we sail through sentences with pronouns, not even noticing the ambiguity.
We have been running a number of studies on pronoun understanding (for some previous posts, see here and here). One line of work looks at a peculiar contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s:
Causal Verbs
From the beginning, most if not all researchers agreed that this must have something to do with how verbs encode causality: "Sally frightens Mary" suggests that Sally is the cause, which is why you then think that "because she…" refers to Sally, and vice versa for "Sally loves Mary".
The problem was finding a predictive theory: which verbs encode causality which way? A number of theories have been proposed. The first, from Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and Deborah Fish (1983) was that for emotion verbs (frightens, loves), the cause is the person who *isn't* experiencing the emotion -- Sally in (1) and Mary in (2) -- and the subject for all other verbs. This turned out not to be correct. For instance:
A number of other proposals have been made, but the data in the literature doesn't clearly support any one (though Rudolph and Forsterling's 1997 theory has been the most popular). In part, the problem was that we had data on a small number of verbs, and as mathematicians like to tell us, you can draw an infinite number of lines a single point (and create many different theories to describe a small amount of data).
Most previous studies had looked at only a few dozen. With the help of visitors to GamesWithWords.org, we collected data on over 1000 verbs. (We weren't the only ones to notice the problem -- after we began our study, Goikoetxea and colleagues published data from 100 verbs in Spanish and Ferstl and colleagues published data from 305 in English). We found that in fact none of the existing theories worked very well.
However, when we took in independently developed theory of verb meaning from linguistics, that actually predicted the results very well. All of the theories tried to divide up verbs into a few classes. Within each class, it was supposed to be all the verbs with either have causes as their subjects (causing people to interpret the pronoun is referring to the subject in sentences like 1-3). Unfortunately, this was rarely the case, as shown in Table 2 of the paper:
A new theory
This was, of course, disappointing. We wanted to understand pronoun interpretation better, but now we understood worse! Luckily, the work did not end there. We turned to a well-developed theory from linguistics about what verbs mean (the work I have described above was developed by psychologists largely independently from linguistics).
The basic idea behind this theory is that the core meaning of verbs is built out of a few basic parts, such as movement, possession, the application of force, and – importantly for us – causality. In practice, nobody goes through the dictionary and determines for every verb, which of these core components it has. This turns out to be prohibitively difficult to do (but stay tuned; a major new project GamesWithWords.org will be focused on just this). But it turns out that when you classify verbs according to the kinds of sentences they can appear in, this seems to give you the same thing: groups of verbs that share these core components meaning (such as causality).
The prediction, then, is that if we look at verbs in the same class according to this theory, all the verbs in that class should encode causality in the same way and thus should affect pronouns in the same way. And that is exactly what we found. This not only furthers our understanding of the phenomenon we were studying, but it is also confirmation of both the idea that verb meaning plays a central role in the phenomenon and is confirmation of the theory from linguistics.
Why so much work on pronouns?
Pronouns are interesting in their own right, but I am primarily interested in them as a case study in ambiguity. Language is incredibly ambiguous, and most of the time we don't even notice it; For instance, it could be that the "she" in (1) refers to Jennifer -- someone not even mentioned in the sentence! -- but you probably did not even consider that possibility. Because we as humans find the problem so easy, it is very hard for us as scientists to have good intuitions about what is going on. This has become particularly salient as we try to explain to computers what language means (that is, program them to process language).
The nice thing about pronouns is that they are a kind of ambiguity is very easy to study, and many good methods have been worked out for assessing their processing. More than many areas of research on ambiguity -- and, I think, more than many areas of psychology that don't involve vision -- I feel that a well worked-out theory of pronoun processing is increasingly within our reach. And that is very exciting.
------
Hartshorne, J., and Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35 DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2012.689305
Brown, R., and Fish, D. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language Cognition, 14 (3), 237-273 DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(83)90006-9
Unlike a proper name (Jane Austen), a pronoun (she) can refer to a different person just about every time it is uttered. While we occasionally get bogged down in conversation trying to interpret a pronoun (Wait! Who are you talking about?), for the most part we sail through sentences with pronouns, not even noticing the ambiguity.
We have been running a number of studies on pronoun understanding (for some previous posts, see here and here). One line of work looks at a peculiar contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s:
(1) Sally frightens Mary because she...Although the pronoun is ambiguous, most people guess that she refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). That is, the verb used (frightens, loves) seems to affect pronoun resolution.
(2) Sally loves Mary because she...
Causal Verbs
From the beginning, most if not all researchers agreed that this must have something to do with how verbs encode causality: "Sally frightens Mary" suggests that Sally is the cause, which is why you then think that "because she…" refers to Sally, and vice versa for "Sally loves Mary".
The problem was finding a predictive theory: which verbs encode causality which way? A number of theories have been proposed. The first, from Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and Deborah Fish (1983) was that for emotion verbs (frightens, loves), the cause is the person who *isn't* experiencing the emotion -- Sally in (1) and Mary in (2) -- and the subject for all other verbs. This turned out not to be correct. For instance:
(3) Sally blames Mary because she...Here, most people think "she" is Mary, even though this is not an emotion verb and so the "cause" was supposed to be -- on Brown and Fish's theory -- the subject (Sally).
A number of other proposals have been made, but the data in the literature doesn't clearly support any one (though Rudolph and Forsterling's 1997 theory has been the most popular). In part, the problem was that we had data on a small number of verbs, and as mathematicians like to tell us, you can draw an infinite number of lines a single point (and create many different theories to describe a small amount of data).
Most previous studies had looked at only a few dozen. With the help of visitors to GamesWithWords.org, we collected data on over 1000 verbs. (We weren't the only ones to notice the problem -- after we began our study, Goikoetxea and colleagues published data from 100 verbs in Spanish and Ferstl and colleagues published data from 305 in English). We found that in fact none of the existing theories worked very well.
However, when we took in independently developed theory of verb meaning from linguistics, that actually predicted the results very well. All of the theories tried to divide up verbs into a few classes. Within each class, it was supposed to be all the verbs with either have causes as their subjects (causing people to interpret the pronoun is referring to the subject in sentences like 1-3). Unfortunately, this was rarely the case, as shown in Table 2 of the paper:
A new theory
This was, of course, disappointing. We wanted to understand pronoun interpretation better, but now we understood worse! Luckily, the work did not end there. We turned to a well-developed theory from linguistics about what verbs mean (the work I have described above was developed by psychologists largely independently from linguistics).
The basic idea behind this theory is that the core meaning of verbs is built out of a few basic parts, such as movement, possession, the application of force, and – importantly for us – causality. In practice, nobody goes through the dictionary and determines for every verb, which of these core components it has. This turns out to be prohibitively difficult to do (but stay tuned; a major new project GamesWithWords.org will be focused on just this). But it turns out that when you classify verbs according to the kinds of sentences they can appear in, this seems to give you the same thing: groups of verbs that share these core components meaning (such as causality).
The prediction, then, is that if we look at verbs in the same class according to this theory, all the verbs in that class should encode causality in the same way and thus should affect pronouns in the same way. And that is exactly what we found. This not only furthers our understanding of the phenomenon we were studying, but it is also confirmation of both the idea that verb meaning plays a central role in the phenomenon and is confirmation of the theory from linguistics.
Why so much work on pronouns?
Pronouns are interesting in their own right, but I am primarily interested in them as a case study in ambiguity. Language is incredibly ambiguous, and most of the time we don't even notice it; For instance, it could be that the "she" in (1) refers to Jennifer -- someone not even mentioned in the sentence! -- but you probably did not even consider that possibility. Because we as humans find the problem so easy, it is very hard for us as scientists to have good intuitions about what is going on. This has become particularly salient as we try to explain to computers what language means (that is, program them to process language).
The nice thing about pronouns is that they are a kind of ambiguity is very easy to study, and many good methods have been worked out for assessing their processing. More than many areas of research on ambiguity -- and, I think, more than many areas of psychology that don't involve vision -- I feel that a well worked-out theory of pronoun processing is increasingly within our reach. And that is very exciting.
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Hartshorne, J., and Snedeker, J. (2012). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35 DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2012.689305
Ferstl, E., Garnham, A., and Manouilidou, C. (2010). Implicit causality bias in English: a corpus of 300 verbs Behavior Research Methods, 43 (1), 124-135 DOI: 10.3758/s13428-010-0023-2
Rudolph, U., and Forsterling, F. (1997). The psychological causality implicit in verbs: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 121 (2), 192-218 DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.121.2.192
Do you speak Japanese?
Do you speak Japanese?
If so, I've got an experiment for you. A while back I presented some results from a project comparing pronoun processing in English, Spanish, Mandarin and Russian. We're also testing Japanese. So if you speak Japanese and have a few minutes, please follow this link. Even better, if you know someone who is a fluent Japanese speaker -- or, even better, a native Japanese speaker, please send him/her the link.
If you speak English -- and you probably do if you're reading this post -- and have never participating in any of my English pronoun experiments, you can follow this link. These experiments usually take less than 5 minutes.
Huh? Pronoun processing?
For those of you wondering what I could possibly be studying, the interesting thing about pronouns is that their meaning changes wildly depending on context. Given the right context, she can refer to any female (and some things that aren't actually female, like ships). That isn't true of proper names (Jane Austen can only be used to refer to one person).
Some theories state that we learn language-specific cues that help us figure out what a given pronoun in a given context means. Other theories state we use general intelligence to pull off the feat. On the second theory, if you use the same contexts in different languages, people should interpret pronouns the same way. On the first theory, that isn't necessarily the case.
(Obviously I'm being cagey here in terms of how exactly we're manipulating context in the experiment, since I don't want to bias any potential participants.)
More posts on pronouns: here, here and here.
If so, I've got an experiment for you. A while back I presented some results from a project comparing pronoun processing in English, Spanish, Mandarin and Russian. We're also testing Japanese. So if you speak Japanese and have a few minutes, please follow this link. Even better, if you know someone who is a fluent Japanese speaker -- or, even better, a native Japanese speaker, please send him/her the link.
If you speak English -- and you probably do if you're reading this post -- and have never participating in any of my English pronoun experiments, you can follow this link. These experiments usually take less than 5 minutes.
Huh? Pronoun processing?
For those of you wondering what I could possibly be studying, the interesting thing about pronouns is that their meaning changes wildly depending on context. Given the right context, she can refer to any female (and some things that aren't actually female, like ships). That isn't true of proper names (Jane Austen can only be used to refer to one person).
Some theories state that we learn language-specific cues that help us figure out what a given pronoun in a given context means. Other theories state we use general intelligence to pull off the feat. On the second theory, if you use the same contexts in different languages, people should interpret pronouns the same way. On the first theory, that isn't necessarily the case.
(Obviously I'm being cagey here in terms of how exactly we're manipulating context in the experiment, since I don't want to bias any potential participants.)
More posts on pronouns: here, here and here.
Seriously ambiguous pronouns
The intro to Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles goes something like:
In the future, my son will lead humanity in the war against Skynet, a computer system programmed to destroy the world. It has sent machines back through time, some to kill him, one to protect him.The only reading I get on this is that "it" refers to Skynet, and thus Skynet has sent machines back to kill John Conner as well as protect him. So I'm only a few episodes into Season I on Netflix Instant, so perhaps I'm about to find out that Skynet is playing some weird kind of Robert Jordan game, but I suspect rather the writers wanted "it" to refer to "the war". I can get that reading if I squint, but it seems incredibly unnatural.
Findings: Linguistic Universals in Pronoun Resolution
Unlike a proper name (Jane Austen), a pronoun (she) can refer to a different person just about every time it is uttered. While we occasionally get bogged down in conversation trying to interpret a pronoun (Wait! Who are you talking about?), for the most part we sail through sentences with pronouns, not even noticing the ambiguity.
I have been running a number of studies on pronoun understanding. One line of work looks at a peculiar contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s:
(1) Sally frightens Mary because she...
(2) Sally loves Mary because she...
Although the pronoun is ambiguous, most people guess that she refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). That is, the verb used (frightens, loves) seems to affect pronoun resolution. Over the last 36 years, many thousands of undergraduates (and many more thousands of participants at gameswithwords.org) have been put through pronoun-interpretation experiments in an attempt to figure out what is going on. While this is a relatively small problem in the Big World of Pronouns -- it applies only to a small number of sentences in which pronouns appear -- it is also a thorn in the side of many broader theories of pronoun processing. And so the interest.
One open question has been whether the same verbs show the same pronoun biases across different languages. That is, frighten is subject-biased and fear is object-biased (the presence of frightens in sentences like 1 and 2 causes people to resolve the pronoun to the subject, Sally, whereas the presence of loves pushes them towards the object, Mary). If this were the case, it would suggest that something about the literal meaning of the verb is what gives rise to the pronoun bias.
(What else could be causing the pronoun bias, you ask? There are lots of other possibilities. For instance, it might be that verbs have some lexical feature tagging them as subject- or object-biased -- not an obvious solution to me but no less unlikely than other proposals out there for other phenomena. Or people might have learned that certain verbs probabilistically predict that subsequent pronouns were be interpreted as referring to the previous subject or object -- that is, there is no real reason that frighten is subject-biased; it's a statistical fluke of our language and we all learn to talk/listen that way because everyone else talks/listens that way.)
Over the last couple years, I ran a series of pronoun interpretation experiments in English, Russian and Mandarin. There is also a Japanese experiment, but the data for that one have been slow coming in. The English and Russian experiments were run through my website, and I ran the Mandarin one in Taiwan last Spring. I also analyzed Spanish data reported by Goikoetxea et al. (2008). Basically, in all the experiments participants were given sentences like (1) and (2) -- but in the relevant language -- and asked to identify who the pronoun referred to.
The results show a great deal of cross-linguistic regularity. Verbs that are subject-biased in one language are almost always subject-biased in the others, and the same is true for object-biased verbs. I am in the process of writing up the results (just finished Draft 3) and I will discuss these data in more detail in the future, answering questions like how I identify the same verb in different languages. For now, though, here is a little data.
Below is a table with four different verbs and the percentage of people who interpreted the pronoun as referring to the subject of the previous verb. It wasn't the case that the same verbs appeared in all four experiments, so where the experiment didn't include the relevant verb, I've put in an ellipsis.
For some of these verbs, the numbers are closer than for others, but for all verbs, if the verb was subject-biased in one language (more than 50% of participants interpreted the pronoun as referring to the subject), it was subject-biased in all languages. If it was object-biased in one language, it was object-biased in the others.
For the most part, this is not how I analyze the data in the actual paper. In general, it is hard to identify translation-equivalent verbs (for instance, does the Russian nenavidet' mean hate, despise or detest?), so I employ some tricks to get around that. So this particular table actually just got jettisoned from Draft 3 of the paper, but I like it and feel it should get published somewhere. Now it is published on the blog.
BTW If anyone knows how to make researchblogging.org bibligraphies in Chrome without getting funky ampersands (see below), please let me know.
---------
Catherine Garvey, & Alfonso Caramazza (1974). Implicit causality in verbs Linguistic Inquiry, 5, 459-464
Goikoetxea, E., Pascual, G., & Acha, J. (2008). Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish Behavior Research Methods, 40 (3), 760-772 DOI: 10.3758/BRM.40.3.760
photo: Kevin Law
I have been running a number of studies on pronoun understanding. One line of work looks at a peculiar contextual effect, originally discovered by Garvey and Caramazza in the mid-70s:
(1) Sally frightens Mary because she...
(2) Sally loves Mary because she...
Although the pronoun is ambiguous, most people guess that she refers to Sally in (1) but Mary in (2). That is, the verb used (frightens, loves) seems to affect pronoun resolution. Over the last 36 years, many thousands of undergraduates (and many more thousands of participants at gameswithwords.org) have been put through pronoun-interpretation experiments in an attempt to figure out what is going on. While this is a relatively small problem in the Big World of Pronouns -- it applies only to a small number of sentences in which pronouns appear -- it is also a thorn in the side of many broader theories of pronoun processing. And so the interest.
One open question has been whether the same verbs show the same pronoun biases across different languages. That is, frighten is subject-biased and fear is object-biased (the presence of frightens in sentences like 1 and 2 causes people to resolve the pronoun to the subject, Sally, whereas the presence of loves pushes them towards the object, Mary). If this were the case, it would suggest that something about the literal meaning of the verb is what gives rise to the pronoun bias.
(What else could be causing the pronoun bias, you ask? There are lots of other possibilities. For instance, it might be that verbs have some lexical feature tagging them as subject- or object-biased -- not an obvious solution to me but no less unlikely than other proposals out there for other phenomena. Or people might have learned that certain verbs probabilistically predict that subsequent pronouns were be interpreted as referring to the previous subject or object -- that is, there is no real reason that frighten is subject-biased; it's a statistical fluke of our language and we all learn to talk/listen that way because everyone else talks/listens that way.)
random cheetah picture
(couldn't find a picture about cross-linguistic studies of pronouns)
Over the last couple years, I ran a series of pronoun interpretation experiments in English, Russian and Mandarin. There is also a Japanese experiment, but the data for that one have been slow coming in. The English and Russian experiments were run through my website, and I ran the Mandarin one in Taiwan last Spring. I also analyzed Spanish data reported by Goikoetxea et al. (2008). Basically, in all the experiments participants were given sentences like (1) and (2) -- but in the relevant language -- and asked to identify who the pronoun referred to.
The results show a great deal of cross-linguistic regularity. Verbs that are subject-biased in one language are almost always subject-biased in the others, and the same is true for object-biased verbs. I am in the process of writing up the results (just finished Draft 3) and I will discuss these data in more detail in the future, answering questions like how I identify the same verb in different languages. For now, though, here is a little data.
Below is a table with four different verbs and the percentage of people who interpreted the pronoun as referring to the subject of the previous verb. It wasn't the case that the same verbs appeared in all four experiments, so where the experiment didn't include the relevant verb, I've put in an ellipsis.
Subject-Biases for Four Groups of Related Verbs in Four Languages
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4
English convinces 57% forgives 45% remembers 24% understands 60%
Spanish … … recordar 22% comprender 63%
Russian ubezhdala 74% izvinjala 33% pomnila 47% ponimala 60%
Mandarin shuofu 73% baorong 37% … …
For some of these verbs, the numbers are closer than for others, but for all verbs, if the verb was subject-biased in one language (more than 50% of participants interpreted the pronoun as referring to the subject), it was subject-biased in all languages. If it was object-biased in one language, it was object-biased in the others.
For the most part, this is not how I analyze the data in the actual paper. In general, it is hard to identify translation-equivalent verbs (for instance, does the Russian nenavidet' mean hate, despise or detest?), so I employ some tricks to get around that. So this particular table actually just got jettisoned from Draft 3 of the paper, but I like it and feel it should get published somewhere. Now it is published on the blog.
BTW If anyone knows how to make researchblogging.org bibligraphies in Chrome without getting funky ampersands (see below), please let me know.
---------
Catherine Garvey, & Alfonso Caramazza (1974). Implicit causality in verbs Linguistic Inquiry, 5, 459-464
Goikoetxea, E., Pascual, G., & Acha, J. (2008). Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish Behavior Research Methods, 40 (3), 760-772 DOI: 10.3758/BRM.40.3.760
photo: Kevin Law
Findings: The Causality Implicit in Language
Finding Causes
Consider the following:
(1) Sally hates Mary.
a. How likely is this because Sally is the kind of person who hates people?
b. How likely is this because Mary is the kind of person whom people hate?
Sally hates Mary doesn't obviously supply the relevant information, but starting with work by Roger Brown and Debora Fish in 1983, numerous studies have found that people nonetheless rate (a) as more likely than (b). In contrast, people find Sally frightens Mary more indicative of Sally than of Mary (the equivalent of rating (b) higher than (a)). Sentences like Sally likes Mary are called “object-biased,” and sentences like Sally frightens Mary are called “subject-biased.” There are many of sentences of both types.
Brown and Fish, along with many of the researchers who followed them, explain this in terms of an inference from knowledge about how the world works:
(2) Sally hates Mary.
a. Who is most likely responsible? Sally or Mary?
(The photo on the right came up on Flickr when I searched for pictures about "causes". It turns out Flickr is not a good place to look for pictures about "hating," "frightening," or "causes". But I liked this picture.)
Understanding Pronouns
Now consider:
(3) Sally hates Mary because she...
(4) Sally frightens Mary because she...
Most people think that "she" refers to Mary in (3) but Sally in (4). This is a bias -- not absolute -- but it is robust and easy to replicate. Again, there are many verbs which are "object-biased" like hates and many which are "subject-biased" like frightens. Just as in the causal attribution effect above, this pronoun effect seems to be a systematic effect of (at least) the verb used. This fact was first discovered by Catherine Garvey and Alfonso Caramazza in the mid-70s and has been studied extensively first.
The typical explanation of the pronoun effect is that the word "because" implies that you are about to get an explanation of what just happened. Explanations usually refer to causes. So you expect the clause starting with she to refer to the cause of first part of the sentence. Therefore, people must think that Mary caused Sally hates Mary but Sally caused Sally frightens Mary.
Causes and Pronouns
Both effects are called "implicit causality," and researchers have generally assumed that the causal attribution effect and the pronoun effect are basically one and the same. An even stronger version of this claim would be that the pronoun effect relies on the causal attribution effect. People resolve the meaning of the pronouns in (3) and (4) based on who they think the cause of the first part of the sentence is. The causal attribution task in (1) and (2) is supposed to measure exactly that: who people think the cause is.
Although people have been doing this research for around three decades, nobody seems to have actually checked whether this is true -- that is, are verbs that are subject-biased in terms of causal attribution also subject-biased in terms of pronoun interpretation?
I recently ran a series of three studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk to answer this question. The answer is "no."
This figure shows the relationship between causal attribution biases (positive numbers mean the verb is subject-biased, negative means its object-biased) and pronoun biases (100 = completely subject-biased, 0 = completely object-biased). Though there is a trend line in the right direction, it's essentially artifactual. I tested four different types of verbs (the details of the verb classes take longer to explain than they are interesting), and it happens that none of them were subject-biased in terms of pronoun interpretation but object-biased in terms of causal attribution (good thing, since otherwise I would have had nowhere to put the legend). There probably are some such verbs; I just only tested a few types.
I ran three different experiments using somewhat different methods, and all gave similar results (that's Experiment 2 above).
More evidence
A number of previous studies showed that causal attribution is affected by who the subject and object are. For instance, people are more object-biased in interpreting The employee hated the boss than for The boss hated the employee. That is, they seem to think that whether the boss is more likely to be the cause whether the boss is the one hating or hated. This makes some sense: bosses are in a better position to effect employees than vice versa.
I was able to find this effect in my causal attribution experiments, but there was no effect on pronoun resolution. That is, people thought "he" referred to the employee in (5) and the boss in (6) at pretty much the same rate.
(5) The boss hated the employee because he...
(6) The employee hated the boss because he...
Conclusion
This strongly suggests that these two effects are two different effects, due to different underlying mechanisms. I think this will come as a surprise to most people who have studied these effects in the past. It also is a surprise in terms of what we know about language processing. There is lots of evidence that people use any and all relevant information when they are interpreting language. Why aren't people using the conceptualization of the world as revealed by the causal attribution task when interpreting pronouns? And what are people doing when they interpret pronouns in these contexts?
I do have the beginnings of an answer to the latter question, but since the data in this experiment doesn't speak it, that will have to wait for a future post.
---------
Brown, R., & Fish, D. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language Cognition, 14 (3), 237-273 DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(83)90006-9
Garvey, C., & Caramzza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs Linguistic Inquiry, 5, 459-464
Picture: Cobalt123.
Consider the following:
(1) Sally hates Mary.
a. How likely is this because Sally is the kind of person who hates people?
b. How likely is this because Mary is the kind of person whom people hate?
Sally hates Mary doesn't obviously supply the relevant information, but starting with work by Roger Brown and Debora Fish in 1983, numerous studies have found that people nonetheless rate (a) as more likely than (b). In contrast, people find Sally frightens Mary more indicative of Sally than of Mary (the equivalent of rating (b) higher than (a)). Sentences like Sally likes Mary are called “object-biased,” and sentences like Sally frightens Mary are called “subject-biased.” There are many of sentences of both types.
Brown and Fish, along with many of the researchers who followed them, explain this in terms of an inference from knowledge about how the world works:
Consider the two verbs flatter and slander… Just about everyone (most or all persons) can be flattered or slandered. There is no special prerequisite. It is always possible to be the object of slander or flattery … By sharp contrast, however, not everyone, by any means, not even most or, perhaps, many are disposed to flatter or to slander… [Thus] to know that one party to an interaction is disposed to flatter is to have some basis for predicting flattery whereas to know only that one party can be flattered is to know little more than that that party is human. (Brown and Fish 1983, p. 265)Similar results are found by using other ways of asking about who is at fault:
(2) Sally hates Mary.
a. Who is most likely responsible? Sally or Mary?
(The photo on the right came up on Flickr when I searched for pictures about "causes". It turns out Flickr is not a good place to look for pictures about "hating," "frightening," or "causes". But I liked this picture.)
Understanding Pronouns
Now consider:
(3) Sally hates Mary because she...
(4) Sally frightens Mary because she...
Most people think that "she" refers to Mary in (3) but Sally in (4). This is a bias -- not absolute -- but it is robust and easy to replicate. Again, there are many verbs which are "object-biased" like hates and many which are "subject-biased" like frightens. Just as in the causal attribution effect above, this pronoun effect seems to be a systematic effect of (at least) the verb used. This fact was first discovered by Catherine Garvey and Alfonso Caramazza in the mid-70s and has been studied extensively first.
The typical explanation of the pronoun effect is that the word "because" implies that you are about to get an explanation of what just happened. Explanations usually refer to causes. So you expect the clause starting with she to refer to the cause of first part of the sentence. Therefore, people must think that Mary caused Sally hates Mary but Sally caused Sally frightens Mary.
Causes and Pronouns
Both effects are called "implicit causality," and researchers have generally assumed that the causal attribution effect and the pronoun effect are basically one and the same. An even stronger version of this claim would be that the pronoun effect relies on the causal attribution effect. People resolve the meaning of the pronouns in (3) and (4) based on who they think the cause of the first part of the sentence is. The causal attribution task in (1) and (2) is supposed to measure exactly that: who people think the cause is.
Although people have been doing this research for around three decades, nobody seems to have actually checked whether this is true -- that is, are verbs that are subject-biased in terms of causal attribution also subject-biased in terms of pronoun interpretation?
I recently ran a series of three studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk to answer this question. The answer is "no."
This figure shows the relationship between causal attribution biases (positive numbers mean the verb is subject-biased, negative means its object-biased) and pronoun biases (100 = completely subject-biased, 0 = completely object-biased). Though there is a trend line in the right direction, it's essentially artifactual. I tested four different types of verbs (the details of the verb classes take longer to explain than they are interesting), and it happens that none of them were subject-biased in terms of pronoun interpretation but object-biased in terms of causal attribution (good thing, since otherwise I would have had nowhere to put the legend). There probably are some such verbs; I just only tested a few types.
I ran three different experiments using somewhat different methods, and all gave similar results (that's Experiment 2 above).
More evidence
A number of previous studies showed that causal attribution is affected by who the subject and object are. For instance, people are more object-biased in interpreting The employee hated the boss than for The boss hated the employee. That is, they seem to think that whether the boss is more likely to be the cause whether the boss is the one hating or hated. This makes some sense: bosses are in a better position to effect employees than vice versa.
I was able to find this effect in my causal attribution experiments, but there was no effect on pronoun resolution. That is, people thought "he" referred to the employee in (5) and the boss in (6) at pretty much the same rate.
(5) The boss hated the employee because he...
(6) The employee hated the boss because he...
Conclusion
This strongly suggests that these two effects are two different effects, due to different underlying mechanisms. I think this will come as a surprise to most people who have studied these effects in the past. It also is a surprise in terms of what we know about language processing. There is lots of evidence that people use any and all relevant information when they are interpreting language. Why aren't people using the conceptualization of the world as revealed by the causal attribution task when interpreting pronouns? And what are people doing when they interpret pronouns in these contexts?
I do have the beginnings of an answer to the latter question, but since the data in this experiment doesn't speak it, that will have to wait for a future post.
---------
Brown, R., & Fish, D. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language Cognition, 14 (3), 237-273 DOI: 10.1016/0010-0277(83)90006-9
Garvey, C., & Caramzza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs Linguistic Inquiry, 5, 459-464
Picture: Cobalt123.
Pronoun Sleuth
George Washington always refers to George Washington. The pronoun he, on the other hand, can refer to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or anyone else who is male (not just presidents). So, unlike proper names which have the same meaning regardless of context, pronouns have almost no meaning without context.Just saying that we figure out who he and she refer to based on context begs the question of how we do it. What aspects of context matter? The fact that today is Tuesday? Whether it is sunny or rainy? (This isn't a straw man -- both of these things can matter in the right circumstance; I leave it to the reader as an exercise to come up with examples.)
In one of our newest experiments, we took sentences with pronouns and systematically obscured aspects of the context to see if people could still figure out who the pronoun refers to. If they can, then that aspect of the context didn't matter. Play Pronoun Sleuth by clicking here.
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