Accessing sentence participants: The advantage of first mention

Development of the first-mention bias.

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...

efl students gender and socioeconomic status: the use of politeness strategies in the first and second languages

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

Contrasting the First-Mention and Subject-Preference Accounts

A visual-world eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of order of mention and grammatical role on resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Finnish. According to the first-mention account, general cognitive structure-building processes make the firstmentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred antecedent...

Researchers’ First Duty Is to the Participants

The first-mover advantage in scientific publication

Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong “first-mover” effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers published later. Moreover papers are expected to retain this advantage in perpetuity —they should receive more citations indefinitely, no matter how many other paper...