Effects of psychological attention on pronoun comprehension

Abstract

Pronoun comprehension is facilitated for referents that are focused in the discourse context. Discourse focus has been described as a function of attention, especially shared attention, but few studies have explicitly tested this idea. Two experiments used an exogenous capture cue paradigm to demonstrate that listeners' visual attention at the onset of a story influences their preferences during pronoun resolution later in the story. In both experiments trial-initial attention modulated listeners' transitory biases while considering referents for the pronoun, whether it was in response to the capture cue or not. These biases even had a small influence on listeners' final interpretation of the pronoun. These results provide independently motivated evidence that the listener's attention influences the online processes of pronoun comprehension. Trial-initial attentional shifts were made on the basis of non-shared, private information, demonstrating that attentional effects on pronoun comprehension are not restricted to shared attention among interlocutors.

Keywords:

• pronoun resolution
• attention
• discourse processing
• accessibility
• eye-tracking

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Daniel Bauer, Florian Jaeger, Daniel Serrano, and Chris Weisen for discussion of statistical methods. Many thanks also to Glenn Kern, Cathleen Sparks, and Jordan Todd for their help preparing stimuli and collecting data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the 25 trials on which there were no looks to either target or competitor in the first second, trial-initial attention to target was scored as 0.

2. This model had a random slope for condition by items only, and a random slope by capture cue by both subjects and items.

3. This model had a random slope for condition by both subjects and items, and a random slope by capture cue by both subjects only.

4. This analysis included random intercepts for both subjects and items, and a random slope for first mention by items only and for capture cue by subject only.

5. This model included random intercepts for both subjects and items, and a random slope for pronoun target but subjects only, and for capture cue by items only.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by NIH [grant number R01 HD-41522] and partially supported by NSF [grant number BCS-0745627].