Although scientific forum has obliged its members to hide their presence particularly while they are discussing research outcomes to avoid personal biases, a recent trend is encouraging writers to demonstrate their identity as the author of the text through the use of first person pronouns in order to take responsibility for the content. Therefore, the present study focuses on intermediate and ...

research article (ra) genre has been a significant area of research in academic writing over past decades. however, authors’ identity in ras has not received much attention, especially in soft sciences like applied linguistics. this paper reports a corpus analysis of iranian writers’ authorial presence markers in ras in the field of applied linguistics. the corpus comprised 30 ras (200,000 word...

This study is a quantitative and functional corpus-based study of self-mention in soft science Master theses. One important purpose of this study was to find out the functions of self-mention in soft science Master theses. For this purpose, 20 soft science Master theses in four disciplines (Applied linguistics, Psychology, Geography, and Political sciences), were randomly selected out of the li...

Research Article (RA) genre has been a significant area of research in academic writing over past decades. However, authors’ identity in RAs has not received much attention, especially in soft sciences like applied linguistics. This paper reports a corpus analysis of Iranian writers’ authorial presence markers in RAs in the field of applied linguistics. The corpus comprised 30 RAs (200,000 word...

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 first-mentioned noun phrase the preferred antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun. According to the subject-preference account, the preferred anteceden...

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7-8 years of age) but not younger (4-5 years) children integrate co-referential ges...

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...

The present study examined the electrophysiological correlates of the psychological processing of possessive pronouns such as "wo de" (Chinese for "my"/"mine") and "ta de" (Chinese for "his") using a three-stimulus oddball paradigm. Sixteen participants were visually presented the stimuli (possessive pronouns, small circle and big circle). The results showed that, relative to non-self-relevant ...

Prosodic correlates of 6 referent status taxonomies and 3 distance-from-last-mention heuristics both on the acoustic and on the symbolic level (ToBI) were investigated in a corpus of short news reports read by 6 professional newsreaders. Symbolic correlates are found mainly for pronouns, acoustic correlates for nouns and proper names. However, both form and extent of these correlates varies con...