Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T23:48:13.882Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The interpretation of focused pronouns in Norwegian children and adults

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2018

Camilla Hellum Foyn ,
Mila Vulchanova  and
Randi Alice Nilsen
Camilla Hellum Foyn
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Language and Literature, NTNU, 7491 Trondheim, Norway. camilla.foyn@ntnu.no, mila.vulchanova@ntnu.no, randi.nilsen@ntnu.no
Mila Vulchanova
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Language and Literature, NTNU, 7491 Trondheim, Norway. camilla.foyn@ntnu.no, mila.vulchanova@ntnu.no, randi.nilsen@ntnu.no
Randi Alice Nilsen
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Language and Literature, NTNU, 7491 Trondheim, Norway. camilla.foyn@ntnu.no, mila.vulchanova@ntnu.no, randi.nilsen@ntnu.no
Get access

Abstract

Earlier research states that if an unaccented pronoun refers to the subject of the preceding sentence, a focally accented pronoun will refer to the object. In the current study, we tested whether Norwegian adults select the intended pronoun referent in this context. Our study is also the first one to use eye-tracking to investigate children's developing sensitivity to intonational cues in pronoun resolution, and consequently the first one where Norwegian is the object language. The participants were monolingual 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children, and a group of adults. They listened to the Norwegian version of utterances like ‘Sarai hugged Mariaj. Then shei/SHEj hugged her own teddy bear’, while watching two corresponding figures on a screen. This was followed by the question, in Norwegian, ‘Who hugged her own teddybear?’ When answering the question, the adults selected the subject referent (Sara) after unaccented pronouns, and the object referent (Maria) after focally accented pronouns. Eye-tracking data revealed that the 7-year-olds initially looked towards the object referent after hearing the pronoun, and then switched to look at the subject referent, regardless of the pronoun's intonation. The 5-year-olds answered the question by selecting the intended referent more often after a focally accented pronoun than after an unaccented one. Finally, the 3-year-olds showed no clear preferences. These results suggest that Norwegian children under the age of seven are still not adult-like when resolving accented and unaccented pronouns.

Keywords

adultschildreneye-trackingfocal accentfocusintonationlanguage acquisitionNorwegianprocessingpronounprosodyreferencestress
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , May 2018 , pp. 3 - 37
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Andreeva, Bistra, Bott, Oliver, Koreman, Jacques & Solstad, Torgrim. 2013. Prosodic effects of implicit causality in German and Norwegian? In Asu, Eva Liina & Lippus, Pärtel (eds.), Nordic Prosody: Proceedings of the XIth Conference, Tartu 2012, 87–96. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing Noun-phrase Antecedents. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Arnold, Jennifer E., Brown-Schmidt, Sarah & Trueswell, John C.. 2007. Children's use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes 22 (4), 527–565.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baauw, Sergio, Ruigendijk, Esther & Cuetos, Fernando. 2004. The interpretation of contrastive stress in Spanish-speaking children. In van Kampen, Jacqueline & Baauw, Sergio (eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2003 (LOT Occasional Series), 103–114. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Baauw, Sergio, Ruigendijk, Esther, Cuetos, Fernando & Avrutin, Sergey. 2011. The interpretation of stressed and non-stressed pronouns in Spanish language breakdown. Aphasiology 25 (3), 386–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2013. languageR: Data sets and functions with “Analyzing Linguistic Data: A practical introduction to statistics”. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=languageR (R package version 1.4.1; 16 December 2016).Google Scholar
Barr, Dale J. 2008. Analyzing “visual world” eyetracking data using multilevel logistic regression. Journal of Memory and Language 59 (4), 457–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Kliegl, Reinhold, Vasishth, Shravan & Baayen, R. Harald. 2015. Parsimonious mixed models. arXiv:1506.04967 [stat]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04967 (8 April 2016).Google Scholar
Bergmann, Christina, Paulus, Markus & Fikkert, Paula. 2012. Preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns and reflexives: The impact of the task. Journal of Child Language 39 (4), 777–803.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bittner, Dagmar & Kuehnast, Milena. 2011. Comprehension of intersentential pronouns in child German and child Bulgarian. First Language 32 (1–2), 176–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borthen, Kaja, Fretheim, Thorstein & Gundel, Jeanette K.. 1997. What brings a higher-order entity into focus of attention? Sentential pronouns in English and Norwegian. In Mitkov, Ruslan & Boguraev, Branimir (eds.), ANARESOLUTION ’97: Proceedings of a Workshop on Operational Factors in Practical, Robust Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Texts, 88–93. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, Aoju. 2011. Tuning information packaging: Intonational realization of topic and focus in child Dutch. Journal of Child Language 38 (5), 1055–1083.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Colonna, Saveria, Schimke, Sarah & Hemforth, Barbara. 2014. Information structure and pronoun resolution in German and French: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm. In Hemforth, Barbara, Mertins, Barbara & Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine (eds.), Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 44), 175–195. Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht & London: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan. 1985. Intonation comprehension in ten-year-olds. Journal of Child Language 12 (3), 643–661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Hoop, Helen. 2004. On the interpretation of stressed pronouns. In Blutner, Reinhard & Zeevat, Henk (eds.), Optimality Theory and Pragmatics, 25–41. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubey, Amit, Keller, Frank & Sturt, Patrick. 2008. A probabilistic corpus-based model of syntactic parallelism. Cognition 109 (3), 326–344.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dubey, Amit, Sturt, Patrick & Keller, Frank. 2005. Parallelism in coordination as an instance of syntactic priming: Evidence from corpus-based modeling. HLT ’05: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 827–834. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foyn, Camilla Hellum, Vulchanova, Mila & Eshuis, Hendrik Bertil. 2017. The influence of visual context and ‘it’-clefts on ambiguous pronoun processing in Norwegian children. Lingue e linguaggio 16 (1), 63–100.Google Scholar
Fretheim, Thorstein. 1996. Accessing contexts with intonation. In Fretheim & Gundel (eds.), 89–112.Google Scholar
Fretheim, Thorstein & Gundel, Jeanette K. (eds.). 1996. Reference and Referent Accessibility. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fretheim, Thorstein & Nilsen, Randi Alice. 1989. Romsdal intonation: Where east and west Norwegian pitch contours meet. In Niemi, Jussi (ed.), Papers from the Eleventh Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, vol. 2, 442–458. Joensuu: University of Joensuu.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1983. Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Aross-language Study. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grober, Ellen H., Beardsley, William & Caramazza, Alfonso. 1978. Parallel function strategy in pronoun assignment. Cognition 6 (2), 117–133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grosz, Barbara J., Weinstein, Scott & Joshi, Aravind K.. 1995. Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21 (2), 203–225.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69 (2), 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartshorne, Joshua K., Nappa, Rebecca & Snedeker, Jesse. 2014. Development of the first-mention bias. Journal of Child Language 42 (2), 423–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hestvik, Arild & Philip, William. 2000. Binding and coreference in Norwegian child language. Language Acquisition 8 (3), 171–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hornby, Peter A. 1973. Intonation and syntactic structure in the development of presupposition. Presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Hornby, Peter A. & Hass, Wilbur A.. 1970. Use of contrastive stress by preschool children. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 13 (2), 395–399.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ito, Kiwako. 2014. Children's pragmatic use of prosodic prominence. In Matthews, Danielle (ed.), Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition, 199–217. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ito, Kiwako, Bibyk, Sarah A., Wagner, Laura & Speer, Shari R.. 2014. Interpretation of contrastive pitch accent in six- to eleven-year-old English-speaking children (and adults). Journal of Child Language 41 (1), 84–110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ito, Kiwako, Jincho, Nobuyuki, Minai, Utako, Yamane, Naoto & Mazuka, Reiko. 2012. Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults and 6-year-olds. Journal of Memory and Language 66 (1), 265–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Järvikivi, Juhani, Pyykkönen-Klauck, Pirita, Schimke, Sarah, Colonna, Saveria & Hemforth, Barbara. 2014. Information structure cues for 4-year-olds and adults: Tracking eye movements to visually presented anaphoric referents. Language and Cognitive Processes 29 (7), 877–892.Google Scholar
Kameyama, Megumi. 1999. Stressed and unstressed pronouns: Complementary preferences. In Bosch, Peter & van der Sandt, Rob (eds.), Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, 306–321. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Knoeferle, Pia & Kreysa, Helene. 2012. Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension? Frontiers in Psychology 3, 538.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuhl, Patricia K. & Miller, James D.. 1982. Discrimination of auditory target dimensions in the presence or absence of variation in a second dimension by infants. Perception & Psychophysics 31 (3), 279–292.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Brockhoff, Per Bruun & Christensen, Rune Haubo Bojesen. 2015. lmerTest: Tests in Linear Mixed Effects Models. http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lmerTest (R package version 2.0-29; 10 December 2015).Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian & Bates, Elizabeth. 1978. Sentential devices for conveying giveness and newsness: A cross-cultural developmental study. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 17 (5), 539–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, Michael P. 1973. The effects of stress on the understanding of pronominal co-reference in children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2 (1), 1–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mehler, Jacques, Jusczyk, Peter, Lambertz, Ghislaine, Halsted, Nilofar, Bertoncini, Josiane & Amiel-Tison, Claudine. 1988. A precursor of language acquisition in young infants. Cognition 29 (2), 143–178.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nazzi, Thierry, Bertoncini, Josiane & Mehler, Jacques. 1998. Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24 (3), 756–766.Google ScholarPubMed
Nilsen, Randi A. 1989. On prosodically marked information structure in spoken Norwegian. Master's thesis, NTNU.Google Scholar
Pyykkönen, Pirita, Matthews, Danielle & Järvikivi, Juhani. 2010. Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension: A visual world study of pronoun resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes 25 (1), 115–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. 2015. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. http://www.R-project.org/ (R version 3.3.0; 6 June 2016).Google Scholar
Sauermann, Antje, Höhle, Barbara, Chen, Aoju & Järvikivi, Juhani. 2011. Intonational marking of focus in different word orders in German children. In Washburn, Mary Byram, McKinney-Bock, Katherine, Varis, Erika, Sawyer, Ann & Tomaszewicz, Barbara (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 28), 313–322. Somerville, MA: Casadilla Press.Google Scholar
Sekerina, Irina A, Stromswold, Karin & Hestvik, Arild. 2004. How do adults and children process referentially ambiguous pronouns? Journal of Child Language 31 (1), 123–152.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smyth, Ron. 1994. Grammatical determinants of ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 23 (3), 197–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solan, Lawrence. 1980. Contrastive stress and children's interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research 23 (3), 688–698.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Solan, Lawrence. 1983. Pronominal Reference: Child Language and the Theory of Grammar. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Song, Hyun-joo & Fisher, Cynthia. 2005. Who's “she”? Discourse prominence influences preschoolers’ comprehension of pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language 52 (1), 29–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Song, Hyun-joo & Fisher, Cynthia. 2007. Discourse prominence effects on 2.5-year-old children's interpretation of pronouns. Lingua 117 (11), 1959–1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speer, Shari R. & Ito, Kiwako. 2009. Prosody in first language acquisition: Acquiring intonation as a tool to organize information in conversation. Language and Linguistics Compass 3 (1), 90–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trainor, Laurel J., Austin, Caren M. & Desjardins, Renée N.. 2000. Is infant-directed speech prosody a result of the vocal expression of emotion? Psychological Science 11 (3), 188–195.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Trueswell, John C. 2011. Studying language processing using eye movements. In Hoff, Erika (ed.), Research Methods in Child Language, 177–190. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Venditti, Jennifer J., Stone, Matthew, Nanda, Preetham & Tepper, Paul. 2001. Toward an account of accented pronoun interpretation in discourse context: Evidence from eye-tracking. Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.Google Scholar
Venditti, Jennifer J., Stone, Matthew, Nanda, Preetham & Tepper, Paul. 2002. Discourse constraints on the interpretation of nuclear-accented pronouns. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002, 675–678. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Marilyn A. & Prince, Ellen F.. 1996. Bilateral approach to givenness: A hearer-status algorithm and a centering algorithm. In Fretheim & Gundel (eds.), 291–306.Google Scholar
Wells, Bill, Peppé, Sue & Goulandris, Nata. 2004. Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language 31, 749–778.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed