Pub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2282895
Valentina Bambini, Giacomo Ranieri, Luca Bischetti, Biagio Scalingi, Chiara Bertini, Irene Ricci, Walter Schaeken, Paolo Canal
Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal ...
{"title":"The costs of multimodal metaphors: comparing ERPs to figurative expressions in verbal and verbo-pictorial formats","authors":"Valentina Bambini, Giacomo Ranieri, Luca Bischetti, Biagio Scalingi, Chiara Bertini, Irene Ricci, Walter Schaeken, Paolo Canal","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2282895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2282895","url":null,"abstract":"Psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on verbal material. Yet, metaphors frequently occur in a multimodal format, blending words and pictures to convey meaning. Here we compared verbal ...","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"306 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138745262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-26DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2023.2291297
M. M. Davidson
ABSTRACT Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic differences. The purpose of this study was to develop an automated text analysis approach to measure text social information in children’s picture books beyond genre. Studies 1 and 2 found convergent and divergent validity for several measures that captured text social information with these measures being significantly higher in children’s fiction compared to nonfiction books and not correlated with other structural and linguistic text measures. Study 3 found two components of text social information, based on a principal component analysis. These two components captured a general socialness factor (i.e., theory of mind, emotions, and social relationships) and pragmatics/conversation. Study 4 provides preliminary evidence for the predictive validity of the text social information measures. Together, this study provides an initial set of continuous measures for measuring text social information that can begin to advance the field in determining how text social information impacts comprehension and social cognition.
{"title":"Text analysis approach to measuring text social information in children’s picture books","authors":"M. M. Davidson","doi":"10.1080/0163853X.2023.2291297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2023.2291297","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Text social information includes the cognitive processes and social communication skills that support real or hypothetical human thought or interaction. The current measure of text social information is genre. However, genre is a limited measure because of poor operationalization, limited specificity, and overlap with structural and linguistic differences. The purpose of this study was to develop an automated text analysis approach to measure text social information in children’s picture books beyond genre. Studies 1 and 2 found convergent and divergent validity for several measures that captured text social information with these measures being significantly higher in children’s fiction compared to nonfiction books and not correlated with other structural and linguistic text measures. Study 3 found two components of text social information, based on a principal component analysis. These two components captured a general socialness factor (i.e., theory of mind, emotions, and social relationships) and pragmatics/conversation. Study 4 provides preliminary evidence for the predictive validity of the text social information measures. Together, this study provides an initial set of continuous measures for measuring text social information that can begin to advance the field in determining how text social information impacts comprehension and social cognition.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"28 1","pages":"695 - 721"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139235258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2266963
Ekaterina Tskhovrebova, Sandrine Zufferey, Elena Tribushinina
Connectives such as because and but are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in the performance of native Russian-speaking teenagers (N = 107, Mage = 13.93, range: 11 to 17) in a connective-cloze task. The tested connectives marked six coherence relations and were used either predominantly in speech or in the written language. In addition, we examined whether students’ performance with the connectives was modulated by their general linguistic experience, as assessed by a vocabulary test and degree of exposure to print. Our results reveal that interpersonal differences in lexicon size and level of exposure to print were the strongest predictors of appropriate usage of connectives, whereas differences in age, connective mode, and polyfunctionality played a lesser role. This finding may indicate that, starting from age 11, biological age and intrinsic properties of connectives matter less for their mastery than general linguistic experience, as measured by vocabulary level and exposure to print.
{"title":"Vocabulary size and exposure to print predict mastery of connectives in teenage years","authors":"Ekaterina Tskhovrebova, Sandrine Zufferey, Elena Tribushinina","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2266963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2266963","url":null,"abstract":"Connectives such as because and but are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in the performance of native Russian-speaking teenagers (N = 107, Mage = 13.93, range: 11 to 17) in a connective-cloze task. The tested connectives marked six coherence relations and were used either predominantly in speech or in the written language. In addition, we examined whether students’ performance with the connectives was modulated by their general linguistic experience, as assessed by a vocabulary test and degree of exposure to print. Our results reveal that interpersonal differences in lexicon size and level of exposure to print were the strongest predictors of appropriate usage of connectives, whereas differences in age, connective mode, and polyfunctionality played a lesser role. This finding may indicate that, starting from age 11, biological age and intrinsic properties of connectives matter less for their mastery than general linguistic experience, as measured by vocabulary level and exposure to print.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"222 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136112227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2266964
Henri Olkoniemi, Diane Mézière, Johanna K. Kaakinen
Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader’s working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing beyond sentence-level. A promising method to study individual differences in irony processing at the paragraph-level is scanpath analysis. In the present experiment, we analyzed whether individual differences in WMC are reflected in scanpaths during reading ironic stories by combining data from two previous eye-tracking studies (N = 120). The results revealed three different reading patterns: fast-and-linear reading, selective reading, and nonselective rereading. The readers predominantly used the fast-and-linear reading pattern for ironic and literal stories. However, readers were less likely to use the nonselective rereading pattern with ironic than literal texts. The reading patterns for ironic stories were modulated by WMC. Results showed that scanpaths captured differences missed by standard measures, showing it to be a valuable tool to study individual differences in irony processing.
{"title":"Comprehending irony in text: evidence from scanpaths","authors":"Henri Olkoniemi, Diane Mézière, Johanna K. Kaakinen","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2266964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2266964","url":null,"abstract":"Eyetracking studies have shown that readers reread ironic phrases when resolving their meaning. Moreover, it has been shown that the timecourse of processing ironic meaning is affected by reader’s working memory capacity (WMC). Irony is a context-dependent phenomenon but using traditional eye-movement measures it is difficult to analyze processing beyond sentence-level. A promising method to study individual differences in irony processing at the paragraph-level is scanpath analysis. In the present experiment, we analyzed whether individual differences in WMC are reflected in scanpaths during reading ironic stories by combining data from two previous eye-tracking studies (N = 120). The results revealed three different reading patterns: fast-and-linear reading, selective reading, and nonselective rereading. The readers predominantly used the fast-and-linear reading pattern for ironic and literal stories. However, readers were less likely to use the nonselective rereading pattern with ironic than literal texts. The reading patterns for ironic stories were modulated by WMC. Results showed that scanpaths captured differences missed by standard measures, showing it to be a valuable tool to study individual differences in irony processing.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2260246
Jack Dempsey, Anna Tsiola, Kiel Christianson
ABSTRACTMany psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In particular, dynamic accounts where readers use the discourse model to generate expectations for certain grammatical structures before and during parsing differ from serial accounts where an algorithmic first-pass processing mechanism precedes integration of sentence material into the discourse model. To test between these two theories, the current study investigates eye-movement behaviors when reading temporarily ambiguous attachment structures following discourses with biases either matching, mismatching, or neutral with respect to the attachment resolution. No evidence was found suggesting readers systematically use discourse information to generate structural expectations, in line with serial accounts of processing at the sentence–discourse interface. Scanpath analyses further highlight the confirmatory nature of rereading when participants encounter discourse continuations that do not fit with prior contexts. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementAll materials, data, and analyses are shared openly via OSF at https://osf.io/gfjn6/. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/GFJN6.Supplementary materialsSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2023.2260246.
{"title":"Eye-tracking evidence from attachment structures favors a serial model of discourse–sentence interactivity","authors":"Jack Dempsey, Anna Tsiola, Kiel Christianson","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2260246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2260246","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTMany psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In particular, dynamic accounts where readers use the discourse model to generate expectations for certain grammatical structures before and during parsing differ from serial accounts where an algorithmic first-pass processing mechanism precedes integration of sentence material into the discourse model. To test between these two theories, the current study investigates eye-movement behaviors when reading temporarily ambiguous attachment structures following discourses with biases either matching, mismatching, or neutral with respect to the attachment resolution. No evidence was found suggesting readers systematically use discourse information to generate structural expectations, in line with serial accounts of processing at the sentence–discourse interface. Scanpath analyses further highlight the confirmatory nature of rereading when participants encounter discourse continuations that do not fit with prior contexts. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementAll materials, data, and analyses are shared openly via OSF at https://osf.io/gfjn6/. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/GFJN6.Supplementary materialsSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2023.2260246.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"194 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135591014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2252699
Markus Bader, Jacopo Torregrossa, Esther Rinke
This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent’s antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong tendency to refer to a preceding subject, but only if its referent is animate. With inanimate subjects, both forms tend to refer to the animate referent in object position, showing that animacy enhances a referent’s accessibility more than the syntactic function of its previous mention. Demonstratives in German and Italian generally tend to refer to object antecedents, a tendency that is also influenced by the animacy of the referent, especially in German. The cross-linguistic comparison reveals that the effect of animacy is overall stronger in German than in Italian, suggesting that across languages, different forms may show a different sensitivity to syntactic function and animacy.
{"title":"Pinning down the interaction between animacy and syntactic function in the interpretation of German and Italian personal and demonstrative pronouns","authors":"Markus Bader, Jacopo Torregrossa, Esther Rinke","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2252699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2252699","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent’s antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong tendency to refer to a preceding subject, but only if its referent is animate. With inanimate subjects, both forms tend to refer to the animate referent in object position, showing that animacy enhances a referent’s accessibility more than the syntactic function of its previous mention. Demonstratives in German and Italian generally tend to refer to object antecedents, a tendency that is also influenced by the animacy of the referent, especially in German. The cross-linguistic comparison reveals that the effect of animacy is overall stronger in German than in Italian, suggesting that across languages, different forms may show a different sensitivity to syntactic function and animacy.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135895815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2260247
Lijuan Chen, Xiaodong Xu, Hongling Lv
ABSTRACTA fictional story is always narrated from a certain narrative voice and mode of focalization. These core narrative techniques have a major impact on how readers interpret the narrative plot and connect with the characters. This study used eye-tracking to investigate how classic narrative reading is affected by narrative voice and focalization. The results showed that the third-person narrative voice was read more slowly than the first-person narrative voice, especially when the narrative was presented with internal focalization. Importantly, the transition from a first-person to a third-person narrative voice generally resulted in longer reading times, whereas a switch from a third-person to a first-person narrative voice only yielded limited benefits in terms of reduced reading time. These findings provide direct evidence to support the assumption that there is a distinction between the first-person narration and the third-person narration and demonstrate the important role of narrative voice and focalization in understanding narrative texts. AcknowledgmentsWe are grateful to Professor Jie Zhang for his invaluable support in conducting this study. We are also grateful to Tianyue Wang and Yiyi Lu for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data. We are thankful to the reviewer for prompting us to consider this important question.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis study was supported by the Jiangsu Social Science Fund (Grant No. [23YYB010]), the Grand for the Social Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. [2021SJA0086]), the High-quality Research Project on the Application of Social Science in Jiangsu Province (Grant No. [22SWB-17]), and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Key Program: Grant No. [18AYY010]; Major Program: Grant No. [21&ZD288]).
{"title":"How literary text reading is influenced by narrative voice and focalization: <i>evidence from eye movements</i>","authors":"Lijuan Chen, Xiaodong Xu, Hongling Lv","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2260247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2260247","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTA fictional story is always narrated from a certain narrative voice and mode of focalization. These core narrative techniques have a major impact on how readers interpret the narrative plot and connect with the characters. This study used eye-tracking to investigate how classic narrative reading is affected by narrative voice and focalization. The results showed that the third-person narrative voice was read more slowly than the first-person narrative voice, especially when the narrative was presented with internal focalization. Importantly, the transition from a first-person to a third-person narrative voice generally resulted in longer reading times, whereas a switch from a third-person to a first-person narrative voice only yielded limited benefits in terms of reduced reading time. These findings provide direct evidence to support the assumption that there is a distinction between the first-person narration and the third-person narration and demonstrate the important role of narrative voice and focalization in understanding narrative texts. AcknowledgmentsWe are grateful to Professor Jie Zhang for his invaluable support in conducting this study. We are also grateful to Tianyue Wang and Yiyi Lu for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data. We are thankful to the reviewer for prompting us to consider this important question.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis study was supported by the Jiangsu Social Science Fund (Grant No. [23YYB010]), the Grand for the Social Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. [2021SJA0086]), the High-quality Research Project on the Application of Social Science in Jiangsu Province (Grant No. [22SWB-17]), and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Key Program: Grant No. [18AYY010]; Major Program: Grant No. [21&ZD288]).","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135898308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-26DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255494
Alexandra Lorson, Hannah Rohde, Chris Cummins
When communicating, interlocutors negotiate knowledge by proposing propositional content to be added to their shared common ground. The way in which speakers put forward propositional content – expressing more or less confidence in its truthfulness – may affect the way in which other interlocutors react to such content. This article examines speakers’ production choices and hearers’ interpretations of the formulations believe/know/bare assertion to test how (maximal) certainty is expressed and inferred, whether speakers adjust their production choices depending on their communicative goals and whether hearers are able to adjust their interpretations correspondingly. For this purpose, we created two scenarios – one with a cooperative interlocutor and one with a potentially uncooperative interlocutor. The results suggest that know is epistemically the most powerful formulation – stronger than the bare assertion – but that the bare assertion may still be preferred over know for expressing maximal certainty in cooperative scenarios. Our findings also suggest that believe is used to hedge the assertive strength of statements in cooperative settings. Whereas speakers and hearers agree in the relative epistemic ordering of the formulations (believe < bare assertion < know), when inferring the speakers’ degrees of belief hearers to not appear to consistently take into account that speakers’ communicative goals may shift as a function of context.
{"title":"Epistemicity and communicative strategies","authors":"Alexandra Lorson, Hannah Rohde, Chris Cummins","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255494","url":null,"abstract":"When communicating, interlocutors negotiate knowledge by proposing propositional content to be added to their shared common ground. The way in which speakers put forward propositional content – expressing more or less confidence in its truthfulness – may affect the way in which other interlocutors react to such content. This article examines speakers’ production choices and hearers’ interpretations of the formulations believe/know/bare assertion to test how (maximal) certainty is expressed and inferred, whether speakers adjust their production choices depending on their communicative goals and whether hearers are able to adjust their interpretations correspondingly. For this purpose, we created two scenarios – one with a cooperative interlocutor and one with a potentially uncooperative interlocutor. The results suggest that know is epistemically the most powerful formulation – stronger than the bare assertion – but that the bare assertion may still be preferred over know for expressing maximal certainty in cooperative scenarios. Our findings also suggest that believe is used to hedge the assertive strength of statements in cooperative settings. Whereas speakers and hearers agree in the relative epistemic ordering of the formulations (believe < bare assertion < know), when inferring the speakers’ degrees of belief hearers to not appear to consistently take into account that speakers’ communicative goals may shift as a function of context.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134958351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-18DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255075
Jordan Gallant, Kerry Sluchinski
ABSTRACT This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, “TA,” in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender pronouns in reference to antecedents with varying stereotypical gender (e.g., occupation terms) and definitional gender (e.g., kinship terms). In our analysis, we assessed several means of operationalizing stereotypical gender information. Optimal model performance was achieved with a continuous measure that accounted for individual differences in gender perception, suggesting the involvement of a probabilistic component. Results for reading latencies and perceived appropriateness of TA support previous findings from discourse analysis that TA is not entirely gender-neutral but rather has nuanced contexts of use in modern Chinese written discourse.
{"title":"Non-gendered pronoun processing: an investigation of the gender non-specific third person singular pronoun ‘TA’ in Chinese","authors":"Jordan Gallant, Kerry Sluchinski","doi":"10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255075","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, “TA,” in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender pronouns in reference to antecedents with varying stereotypical gender (e.g., occupation terms) and definitional gender (e.g., kinship terms). In our analysis, we assessed several means of operationalizing stereotypical gender information. Optimal model performance was achieved with a continuous measure that accounted for individual differences in gender perception, suggesting the involvement of a probabilistic component. Results for reading latencies and perceived appropriateness of TA support previous findings from discourse analysis that TA is not entirely gender-neutral but rather has nuanced contexts of use in modern Chinese written discourse.","PeriodicalId":11316,"journal":{"name":"Discourse Processes","volume":"172 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135203397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-18DOI: 10.1080/0163853x.2023.2255508
Katherine Chia, Ashley A. Edwards, Christopher Schatschneider, Michael P. Kaschak
ABSTRACTWe report three experiments that assess whether structural priming in a question–answer dialogue context is affected by the use of direct requests, conventional indirect requests, and nonconventional indirect requests. In Experiments 1 and 2, experimenters made phone calls to businesses and asked either Can you tell me (at) what time you close? (conventional indirect request) or May I ask you (at) what time you close? (nonconventional indirect request). Structural priming was demonstrated by participants’ greater tendency to produce a preposition in their response (At 9 vs. 9 o’clock) when the question had a preposition than when it did not. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that priming is not statistically different across request types. In Experiment 3, we compared priming for the conventional indirect requests to priming for direct requests ([At] what time do you close?). Again, priming did not differ across question types. We conducted a final analysis that included data from all three experiments plus a large dataset collected using the same procedure. The larger analysis (n > 43,000) confirmed that priming did not differ across sentence types. AcknowledgmentWe thank the many research assistants who assisted with these studies: Rebecca Applebaum, Samirah Artiste, Haley Barash, Mia Carter, Alathea Fairweather, Matthew Gomes, Karina Guenin, Alex Gutowski, Victoria Kolev, Elizabeth Lacy, Mollie Londot, Jordan Madsen, Jennifer Mast, Casey Oberdick, Maria Ribeiro-Siqueira, Kayla Sizemore, Lindsey Summerlin, Kristen Tinnerman, Jeremiah Townsend, Richard Valencia, Olivia Wentworth-Buchanan, Alyssa Westmoreland, Rachel White, Jordan Wiener, and Ashlyn Young.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. We analyzed the data with the following model: Dependent Variable ~ Question Type × Sentence + (1 + Question Type | Experimenter).2. Confidence intervals computed using the confint() function in R, based on the model specified in footnote 1.3. The designation “responded to the direct component of the indirect request” should only apply to the conventional and nonconventional indirect requests. However, there were a small number of cases where participants responded to What time do you close? (a direct request) by saying Sure! We close at 9 (or something similar). These were coded as “1” because the participant provided a yes or no answer before responding to the request for information (even though the question did not include a yes or no component).
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