The choice and processing of referential expressions depend on the referents' status within the discourse, such that pronouns are generally preferred over full repetitive references when the referent is salient. Here we report two visual-world experiments showing that: (1) in spoken language comprehension, this preference is reflected in delayed fixations to referents mentioned after repeated d...

This paper investigates the use of sentential pronouns in English and Norwegian. We argue that resolution of sentential pronouns is sensitive to the distinction between forms whose referents must be in focus and forms whose referents must only be activated, but not necessarily in focus. An investigation of the distribution and interpretation of sentential pronouns also reveals that the relative...

Every day, we primarily experience actions as agents, by having a concrete perspective on our actions, their means and goals. This peculiar perspective is what allows us to successfully plan and execute our actions in a dense social environment. Nevertheless, in this environment actions are also perceived from an observer's perspective. Adopting such a perspective helps us to understand and res...

The paper introduces Treex CR, a coreference resolution (CR) system not only for Czech. As its name suggests, it has been implemented as an integral part of the Treex NLP framework. The main feature that distinguishes it from other CR systems is that it operates on the tectogrammatical layer, a representation of deep syntax. This feature allows for natural handling of elided expressions, e.g. u...

Recent studies in social psychology have found that the frequency of certain words in people’s speech and writing is related to psychological aspects of their personal health. We investigated whether counts of ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘other’’ pronouns used by 59 couples engaged in a problem-solving discussion were related to indices of marital health. One spouse in each couple had a diagnosis of obsessiv...

Self-referential evaluation of emotional stimuli has been shown to modify the way emotional stimuli are processed. This study aimed at a new approach by investigating whether self-reference alters emotion processing in the absence of explicit self-referential appraisal instructions. Event-related potentials were measured while subjects spontaneously viewed a series of emotional and neutral noun...

Psychological analysis of language has repeatedly shown that an individual’s rate of mentioning 1st person singular pronouns predicts a wealth of important demographic and psychological factors. However, these analyses are performed out of context — syntactic and semantic — which may change the magnitude or even direction of such relationships. In this paper, we put “pronouns in their context”,...

BACKGROUND Language use is often disrupted in patients with schizophrenia; novel computational approaches may provide new insights. AIMS To test word use patterns as markers of the perceptual, cognitive and social experiences characteristic of schizophrenia. METHOD Word counting software was applied to first-person accounts of schizophrenia and mood disorder. RESULTS More third-person plu...

Elaborating one of the points of his Coling ~onn 1986 paper, the author discusses prononfn~lity, which is due to a special semantic stratum, singulatire identifieational deixis. Personal, reflexive and interrogative pronouns have additional transn[issional deictic markings, but singulative identificational pronominality alone has a direct anaphorie effect and tends to reinforce syntactically. T...

Children's poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms....