{"pk":31408,"title":"Parallelism in Pronoun Comprehension","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The aim of this study was to distinguish between two heuristic strategies proposed to account for the assignment of ambiguous pronouns: a subject assignment strategy and a parallel function strategy. According to the subject assignment strategy a pronoun is assigned to a preceding subject noun phrase, whereas according to the parallel function strategy a pronoun is assigned to a previous noun phrase with the same grammatical function. These two strategies were tested by examining the interpretation of ambiguous subject and non-subject pronouns. There was a strong preference for assigning both types of pronouns to preceding subject noun phrases which supported the subject assignment strategy. However the preference was reduced for non-subject pronouns compared to subject pronouns which we interpreted as evidence for grammatical parallelism. A subsidiary aim of the study was to investigate text-level effects of order-of-mention where a pronoun is assigned to a noun phrase which has been mentioned in the szmne sequential position. We did not observe any strong effects although we did observe a possible topic assignment strategy where topic-hood depended on order-ofmention. A post hoc inspection of the materials revealed possible effects of intra-sentential order-of-mention parallelism. We conclude that a subject assignment strategy, a parallel grammatical function strategy, a topic assignment strategy and a parallel order-of-mention strategy m a y all constrain the interpretation of ambiguous subject and non-subject pronouns.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Posters","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/68709154","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alexandar","middle_name":"W. R.","last_name":"Nelson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Rosemary","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Stevenson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Durham","department":""},{"first_name":"Keith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stenning","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1992-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/31408/galley/22477/download/"}]}