2025/05/04 by Heeju Hwang, Gan, Qiao
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Arts and Humanities #East Asian Languages and Societies #FOS: Languages and literature #FOS: Psychology #Linguistics #Mandarin Chinese #Psycholinguistics #Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics #Psychology #Social and Behavioral Sciences #pronoun priming #reference processing
paper · doi:10.17605/osf.io/vhc97
Languages provide a diverse array of referring expressions that help maintain coherence and track entities in discourse. For instance, in the sentence “Ana cleaned up with Liz,” a speaker may subsequently refer to Ana using either a full noun phrase (“Ana”) or a reduced form such as a pronoun (“she”). The choice of referential form depends on multiple interacting factors, including discourse context and speaker experience. Prior research has shown that discourse features such as grammatical roles and the topicality of antecedents play a key role in pronoun use. Recent findings also suggest that prior exposure to pronouns can increase the likelihood of subsequent pronoun use—a phenomenon known as pronoun priming. However, the underlying nature of pronoun priming remains poorly understood. This project investigates the cognitive and representational mechanisms that drive pronoun priming, focusing on how discourse context and exposure to pronouns interact with each other. Specifically, we ask whether exposure to a particular referential form (e.g., an overt pronoun) in a given discourse context increases the likelihood of producing either the same or a different pronominal form in a subsequent context that favors a particular type of pronoun. We address this question by examining pronoun use in Mandarin Chinese, a language that permits both overt and null (unspoken) pronouns, whose distribution is shaped by distinct discourse factors such as grammatical function and topicality.