In many contexts, pronouns are interpreted as referring to the character mentioned first in the previous sentence, an effect called the ‘firstmention 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 ...

We report the first study on pronoun use by an under-studied research population, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to American Sign Language from birth by their deaf parents. Personal pronouns cause difficulties for hearing children with ASD, who sometimes reverse or avoid them. Unlike speech pronouns, sign pronouns are indexical points to self and other. Despite this transp...

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the modulation of pronoun resolution processes by the information status of the antecedent. Information status was manipulated by using a structurally based constraint (e.g., order of mention) as well as a pragmatically based constraint (i.e., topichood). We found that the pronouns referring to topic entities [the in...

Abstract Negative word-of-mouth is a strong consumer and user response to dissatisfaction. Moral outrages can create an excessive collective aggressiveness against one single argument, word, or action of person resulting in hateful speech. In this work, we examine the change vocabulary explore outbreak online firestorms on Twitter. The sudden emotional state be captured language. It reveals how...

Five experiments used self-paced reading time to examine the ways in which complex noun phrases (both conjoined NPs and possessive NPs) inuence the interpretation of referentially dependent expressions. The experimental conditions contrasted the reading of repeated names and pronouns referring to components of a complex NP and to the entire complex NP. The results indicate that the entity intr...

thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. while a large number of so called metadiscoursal resour...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have revealed that self-related tasks (items) receive more attention than non-self-related, and that they elicit event-related potential (ERP) components with larger amplitudes. Since personality has been reported as one of the biological correlates influencing these components, as well as our behavioural differences, it is important to examine how it affects our sel...

Authorial identity construction is one of many professional rhetorical strategies employed by authors in academic review genres. Authors usually create a persona to represent themselves, their seniority the field, and community which they belong. The author’s visibility made possible through several devices. Perhaps most remarkable way such authorial article genre self-mentions. aims this resea...

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses with repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in emphatic and non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 1, repeated names and overt pronouns caused a processing delay when they referred to salient antecedents in non-emphatic contexts. In Experiment 2, both processin...

Two experiments were conducted to examine the on-line processing mechanisms used by young children to comprehend pronouns. The work focuses on their use of two highly relevant sources of information: (1) the gender and number features carried by English pronouns, and (2) the differing accessibility of discourse entities, as influenced by order-of-mention in a clause. Adults use both evidential ...