title: The road to understanding is paved with the speaker's intentions: cues to the speaker's attention and intentions affect pronoun comprehension.
abstract: A series of experiments explore the effects of attention-directing cues on pronoun resolution, contrasting four specific hypotheses about the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns he and she: (1) it is driven by grammatical rules, (2) it is primarily a function of social processing of the speaker's intention to communicate, (3) it is modulated by the listener's own egocentric attention, and (4) it is primarily a function of learned probabilistic cues. Experiment 1 demonstrates that pronoun interpretation is guided by the well-known N1 (first-mention) bias, which is also modulated by both the speaker's gaze and pointing gestures. Experiment 2 demonstrates that a low-level visual capture cue has no effect on pronoun interpretation, in contrast with the social cue of pointing. Experiment 3 uses a novel intentional cue: the same attention-capture flash as in Experiment 2, but with instructions that the cue is intentionally created by the speaker. This cue does modulate the N1 bias, demonstrating the importance of information about the speaker's intentions to pronoun resolution. Taken in sum, these findings demonstrate that pronoun resolution is a process best categorized as driven by an appreciation of the speaker's communicative intent, which may be subserved by a sensitivity to predictive cues in the environment.
authors.affiliation: Harvard University, United States.
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Nappa
authors.affiliation: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, United States. Electronic address: jarnold@email.unc.edu.
authors.forename: Jennifer E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Arnold
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male
keywords: Attention; Common ground; Language comprehension; Pronoun resolution