PSYC 432 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Mental Model, Eye Tracking
Document Summary
How do we choose referential expressions: modification vs. no modification, descriptions vs. pronouns, acoustic prominence vs. reduced. Context matters: discussion of what drives the use of pronouns. Must specify what you are referring to. At one level, pronouns are ambiguous; but ambiguous doesn"t mean it. He had breakfast. (cid:499) he is not unclear. Use pronouns = one person, gender difference, subject (or first person. Overusing john is unnecessary and unacceptable is unclear mentioned in the sentence) Subject bias/first mentioned bias: have a preference for the first thing mentioned to assume the pronoun goes to the subject/first mentioned. Parallelism bias: adam gave john a toy. Cognitive mechanism: speaker must think about what the listener is thinking and make sure they have clarity in what they say. Must know they might not have same idea in their mind (theory of mind) Requires us to know what we are going to say to know if we can use a pronoun.
