We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable framework for testing the role of experience in se...

We found o direct relationship between voriotion in informants’ grommoticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants’ use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It hos been proproposed that ‘c-command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within-sentence coreference between pronouns and...

A standard assumption in linguistic, psycholinguistic, and computational research on pronoun use is that production and interpretation are guided by the same set of contextual factors. Kehler et al. (2008) and Kehler & Rohde (2013) have argued instead for a Bayesian model, one in which pronoun production is insensitive to a class of semanticallyand pragmaticallydriven contextual biases that hav...

In this paper we investigate how case features are represented and processed during language comprehension. To this end, we explored the phenomena of case attraction in German in a series of four experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgment procedure. Case attraction leads to errors that are akin to subject-verb agreement errors intensively studied in English and other languages (e.g. Bo...

This paper presents a corpus-based approach for deriving heuristics to locate the antecedents of relative pronouns. The technique dupficates the performance of hand-coded rules and requires human intervention only during the training phase. Because the training instances are built on parser output rather than word cooccurrences, the technique requires a small number of training examples and can...

This study presents a novel method of automatic English reference question generation. The English reference question is a multiple choice question which is comprised of a reading passage, a target pronoun, a correct answer (an antecedent of the target pronoun), and three distractors. The reading passage is generated by transforming human made passages using the proposed sentence splitting tech...

Parsing strategies in temporarily ambiguous sentences were investigated in readers with different sentence memory capacities using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Readers with a high memory span as well as readers with a low memory span were required to read subject and object relative sentences which were either ambiguous until the last word (late disambiguation) or were disambiguated b...

The application of statistical approaches to problems in natural language processing generally requires large (1,000,000÷ words) corpora to produce useful results. In this paper we show that a well-known statistical technique, the t test, can be applied to smaller corpora than was previously thought possible, by relying on semantic features rather than lexical items in a corpus of limited domai...

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or differ...