Clare PattersonSep 8, 2023
📢 New publication klaxon!! 📢 My first ever Registered Report 😻 🎉 How focus and position affect the interpretation of demonstrative pronouns. Open access, available here: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.75350
How Focus and Position Affect the Interpretation of Demonstrative Pronouns

The explicit marking of focus has a measurable impact on language comprehension, including the interpretation of pronouns, but so far the impact of focus on demonstrative pronouns has been largely overlooked. Using story-completion experiments with ditransitive contexts in German, we tested the role of focus in demonstrative pronoun resolution using the tools of the Bayesian model for pronouns, and furthermore investigated whether final position influences demonstrative pronoun interpretation independently of focus. We found that demonstrative pronouns are indeed influenced by focus to a similar extent as personal pronouns, but the influence for demonstratives is mediated via the next-mention bias. Final position also influences demonstrative pronouns, mediated not via the next-mention bias but the production likelihood.

University of California Press
Show threadClare PattersonSep 8, 2023
🧵 Thread 🧵
We wanted to know why the German demonstrative dieser often gets interpreted as the last-mentioned referent. Is it because final position is a default focus position? Or is focus independent of final position? We also investigated *how* these factors exert an influence, using the Bayesian Model for Pronouns.
Show threadClare Patterson
Exp 1 confirmed that focus does indeed influence dieser interpretations, and it does so via the next-mention bias. i.e. this is not a pronoun-specific preference, rather, it comes about because addressees expect that whatever is in focus will be mentioned next.
Sep 8, 2023 at 10:20amWeb
Show threadClare PattersonSep 8, 2023
Exp 2 kept focus constant and varied position, to see whether final position influences dieser interpretations irrespective of focus. And indeed, it does! But here, the mechanism is different. Final position doesn’t much influence general expectations of what will be mentioned next. Rather, it affects the pronoun-production bias, which is to say, addressees estimate that speakers will pronominalise last-mentioned referents (using dieser).
Show threadClare PattersonSep 8, 2023
So, focus and position influence dieser interpretations independently, and via different mechanisms! We think this is a pretty cool finding because it shows that factors affecting interpretations are not all doing the same thing and are somehow just counted up or combined. A factor that looks, on the surface, like it influences pronoun resolution might simply be adjusting our expectations about who or what comes next in the discourse, and is not specific to pronoun interpretation.
Show threadClare PattersonSep 8, 2023
A final shout out to the editorial team at Collabra: Psychology, where we published this work. This was honestly one of the best and most author-friendly publishing experiences I have ever had, from the submission guidelines to the commitment of the editor to bringing the best out of the review process. Thumbs up all round! #psycholinguistics