{"pk":24613,"title":"Exploring the flexibility of perspective reasoning: Evidence from pronoun resolution","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Work in psycholinguistics continues to demonstrate new ways in which perspective-taking guides language processing. E.g., recent work shows that, in sentences like “Sophie [told Amanda that]/[asked Amanda if] she likes learning new languages”, readers use perspective reasoning to judge the ambiguous pronoun as near-categorically referring to the subject antecedent in TELL (because Sophie possesses the relevant knowledge) and the object antecedent in ASK (Amanda’s knowledge). Although these patterns demonstrate a robust perspective effect, could they instead arise from shallow lexical cues provided by TELL/ASK? Experiment 1 rules out lexical-cue explanations by showing that preceding context sentences can compel readers to actually reverse the “default” antecedent judgements otherwise found for TELL/ASK sentences. Experiment 2 further explores the pragmatic basis of perspective-taking in stand-alone sentences by simply varying character properties, e.g., “Max asked his [son/tutor] Gerald if he understood the assignment correctly”, where Gerald’s role shifts who likely holds the relevant knowledge.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Language understanding; Pragmatics; Reasoning"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1fc3s9g3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Tiana","middle_name":"V.","last_name":"Simovic","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""},{"first_name":"Craig","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chambers","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24613/galley/17971/download/"}]}