Resolving Ambiguous Pronouns -- study --

[HuckleB]

Resolving ambiguous pronouns

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=28690

"Medicines can be harmful to young children. Make sure you keep them locked in the bathroom cabinet." (Do we put the children or the medicines in the bathroom cabinet?)

This humorous warning demonstrates a common grammatical error - ambiguous pronouns. Most of the time, common sense kicks in and we know we're supposed to lock medication in the bathroom cabinet and not the kids. In other instances, however, the clarification of these phrases is not always so obvious. How we go about removing the ambiguity from ambiguous pronouns without realizing what we are doing is a complex matter of cognitive processes, both grammatical, referring to the part of speech being mentioned, and order-of-mention, meaning where in the phrase the pronoun is placed.

Juhani Järvikivi, Roger P.G. van Gompel, Jukka Hyönä, and Raymond Bertram tackled this challenge, as reported in the article "Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution" in the April 2005 issue of Psychological Science. They found that while both order-of-mention and grammatical thought processes significantly affect ambiguous pronoun resolution, the grammatical aspect is more important.

In designing this study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the researchers focused on two opposing theories of cognition that dispute the resolution, or assignment of ambiguous pronouns. The "first-mention" account states that the preferred antecedent of the ambiguous pronoun is whichever noun phrase comes first in the sentence, regardless of its grammatical significance. Conversely, the "subject-preference" account argues that the preferred antecedent is the grammatical subject of the sentence, without taking into account its placement in the sentence.

..."

[JDPriestly]

1. Ambiguous pronouns -- what a vice,

not that I don't occasionally indulge

[Boomer]

2. Oh, so THAT's what they're talking about

The headline really had me puzzled for a minute because "ambiguous pronouns" are what gay people use as subtext language, with the ambiguity centered on gender rather than subject agreement.

"A friend and I were walking down the street..."

"Oh, yeah, I saw that movie last night, too. The friend that I went with hated it. But then my friend doesn't like horror films in general."

It's amazing how long you can hold a conversation about yourself and "another person" without ever disclosing the gender of that person. If you're gay, hearing someone avoid gender pronouns is like seeing a neon sign flashing over their head, with huge lavendar letters spelling out "I'm QUEER!"

[Igel]

3. Dang; I'll have to read it in detail.

Kaiser and Tannenhaus are at Rochester, Trueswell I think was one of Tannenhaus' students from a decade or more ago (and probably Elsie Kaiser's Doktorvater at Penn). It's good to see Elsie's gotten other Finnish researchers to work on eye-tracking studies.

I think that the article makes English pronoun resolution to be less ambiguous than it actually is. Other research (not cited) makes English quirkier than usually thought, so that neither account referred to works adequately for English. And intonation in English plays a role--it was thought to just signal switch reference (i.e., figure out which of the two people the pronoun refers to without the funky intonation, and interpret it as referring to the other one), but that doesn't work very well. OK, it doesn't work at all, really.

I don't think I'd have chosen Finnish, though--it marks its grammatical objects a bit too nicely. There are a few languages that have discourse-driven word order *and* no case marking that I'm aware of ... unfortunately, they're not always in convenient areas. Moreover, Elsie Kaiser's done a bit of unrelated work showing how case marking and reference conspire to affect sentence interpretation. I don't see a reference in a quick scan of the article to non-neutral word orders, which would have been nice, as well. And isn't Finnish pro-drop (i.e., you don't need overt pronouns)?

Still, it's good to see somebody taking issue with Elsie. It'll keep her on her toes.

And nearly any research with discourse-driven word order languages--especially when they put the target sentences in proper discourse settings--is good research. And it's good to see eye-tracking done with something other than English and Dutch.