Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T13:42:59.977Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Development of the first-mention bias*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2014

JOSHUA K. HARTSHORNE ,
REBECCA NAPPA  and
JESSE SNEDEKER
JOSHUA K. HARTSHORNE*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
REBECCA NAPPA
Affiliation:
Harvard University
JESSE SNEDEKER
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
Address for correspondence: Joshua Hartshorne, 77 Massachusetts Ave., 46-4053H, Cambridge, MA 02139. tel: 617 324 2894; e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘first-mention bias’. While adults can rapidly use the first-mention bias to guide pronoun interpretation, it is unclear when this bias emerges during development. Curiously, experiments with children between two and three years old show successful use of order of mention, while experiments with older children (four to five years old) do not. While this could suggest U-shaped development, it could also reflect differences in the methodologies employed. We show that children can indeed use first-mention information, but do so too slowly to have been detected in previous work reporting null results. Comparison across the present and previously published studies suggests that the speed at which children deploy first-mention information increases greatly during the preschool years.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 423 - 446
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This work was presented at BUCLD 35 and benefited from comments there. JKH's participation in this project was supported by the Department of Defense (DoD) through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) Program. RN's participation was funded by a grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation (‘Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism and Dyslexia’ to N. Kanwisher & J. Gabrieli, subcontract to JS). Participant recruitment and expenses were funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (0921012 to JS).

References

REFERENCES

Arnold, J. E. (1998). Reference form and discourse patterns. (Unpublished dissertation), Stanford University.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S. & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language & Cognitive Processes 22, 527–65.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, J. G., Brown-Schmidt, S. & Trueswell, J. C. (2000). The rapid use of gender information: evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition 76, B13–26.Google Scholar
Bakker, M., van Dijk, A. & Wicherts, J. M. (2012). The rules of the game called psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, 543–54.Google Scholar
Bates, D. M. & Sarkar, D. (2007). lme4: linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes (Version R package version 0.9975-12).Google Scholar
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, John R. & Brown, Roger (ed.), Cognition and the development of language, 279–362. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Cazden, C. B. (1968). The acquisition of noun and verb inflections. Child Development 39, 433–48.Google Scholar
Choe, J. (2012). Acquisition of raising: intervention effects in A-movement. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meetings of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS).Google Scholar
Corbett, A. T. & Chang, F. R. (1983). Pronoun disambiguation: accessing potential antecedents. Memory & Cognition 11, 283–94.Google Scholar
Crawley, R. A. & Stevenson, R. J. (1990). Reference in single sentences and in texts. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 19, 191–210.Google Scholar
Crawley, R. A., Stevenson, R. J. & Kleinman, D. (1990). The use of heuristic strategies in the interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 19, 245–64.Google Scholar
Crinean, M. & Garnham, A. (2006). Implicit causality, implicit consequentiality, and semantic roles. Language and Cognitive Processes 21, 636–48.Google Scholar
Ervin, S. M. (1964). Imitation and structural change in children's language. In Lenneberg, E. H. (ed.), New directions in the study of language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fagan, J. F. (1971). Infants’ recognition memory for a series of visual stimuli. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 11, 244–50.Google Scholar
Fantz, R. L. (1958). Pattern vision in young infants. Psychological Record 8, 43–7.Google Scholar
Fernald, A., Perfors, A. & Marchman, V. (2006). Picking up speed in understanding: speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year. Developmental Psychology 42, 98–116.Google Scholar
Fernald, A., Pinto, J. P., Swingly, D., Weinberg, A. & McRoberts, G. W. (1998). Rapid gains in speed of verbal processing by infants in the 2nd year. Psychological Science 9, 228–31.Google Scholar
Fernald, A., Thorpe, K. & Marchman, V. A. (2010). Blue car, red car: developing efficiency in online interpretation of adjective-noun phrases. Cognitive Psychology 60, 190–217.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garvey, C. & Caramazza, A. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 5, 459–64.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. C. & Chan, D. (1995). Pronouns, passives, and discourse coherence. Journal of Memory and Language 34, 216–31.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. C., Grosz, B. J. & Gilliom, L. A. (1993). Pronouns, names, and the centering of attention in discourse. Cognitive Science 17, 311–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, P. C. & Scearce, K. A. (1995). Pronominaliation and discourse coherence, discourse structure and pronoun interpretation. Memory & Cognition 23, 313–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartshorne, J. K. & Schachner, A. (2012). Tracking replicability as a method of post-publication open evaluation. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 6(8).Google Scholar
Hartshorne, J. K. & Snedeker, J. (2013). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: the advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(10), 1474–1508.Google Scholar
Hirsch, C. & Wexler, K. (2007). The late acquisition of raising: what children seem to think about seem. In Dubinsky, S. & Davies, B. (eds), New horizons in the analysis of control and raising, 35–70. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Jaeger, F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Langauge 59, 434–46.Google Scholar
Järvikivi, J., van Gompel, R., Hyona, J. & Bertram, R. (2005). Ambiguous pronoun resolution: contrasting the first-mention and subject preference accounts. Psychological Science 16, 260–4.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaiser, E. & Trueswell, J. C. (2008). Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes 23, 709–48.Google Scholar
Kehler, A. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kehler, A., Kertz, L., Rohde, H. & Elman, J. L. (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics 25, 1–44.Google Scholar
Levin, B. & Rappaport Hovav, M. (2005). Argument realization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1974). Children who get worse at understanding the passive: a replication of Bever. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 3, 65–74.Google Scholar
Marcus, G., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, J. T. & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 57.Google Scholar
Pyykkönen, P. & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. Experimental Psychology 57(1), 5–16.Google Scholar
Pyykkönen, P., Matthews, D. & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: a visual world study of pronoun resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes 25, 115–29.Google Scholar
R-development-core-team (2005). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Satistical Computing, online: <http://www.R-project.org>..>Google Scholar
Smyth, R. (1994). Grammatical determinants of ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholiguistic Research 23, 197–229.Google Scholar
Song, H.-J. & Fisher, C. (2005). Who's “she”? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language 52, 29–57.Google Scholar
Song, H.-J. & Fisher, C. (2007). Discourse prominence effects on 2·5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns. Lingua 117, 1959–87.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S. (1985). Preferential-looking methods as tools for the study of cognition in infancy. In Krasnegor, N. A. (ed.), Measurement of audition and vision in the first year of postnatal life: a methodological overview,, 323–63. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.Google Scholar
Stevenson, R. J., Crawley, R. A. & Kleinman, D. (1994). Thematic roles, focus and the representation of events. Language and Cognitive Processes 9, 519–48.Google Scholar
Stewart, A. J., Pickering, M. J. & Sanford, A. J. (1998). Implicit consequentiality. In Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1031–6. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M. & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integreation of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science 268, 1632–4.Google Scholar
Yang, C. L., Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R. & Hue, C. W. (2003). Constraining the comprehension of pronominal expressions in Chinese. Cognition 86, 283–315.Google Scholar