Jennifer Arnold - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Jennifer Arnold

Two experiments explored discourse and communicative factors that contribute to the perceived pro... more Two experiments explored discourse and communicative factors that contribute to the perceived prominence of a word in an utterance, and how that prominence is realized acoustically. In Experiment 1 two hypotheses were tested: (1) acoustic prominence is a product of the given-new status of a word and (2) acoustic prominence depends on the degree to which a referent is accessible, where greater acoustic prominence is used for less accessible entities. In a referential communication task, speakers used acoustic prominence to indicate referent accessibility change, independent of givennew status. In Experiment 2 a variant of Tic Tac Toe was used to investigate whether effects of accessibility are driven by a need to signal the importance of a word or to indicate the word's predictability. The results indicate that both importance and predictability contribute to the prominence of a word, but in different ways.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, May 4, 2021

The pronoun "they" can be either plural or singular, perhaps referring to an individual who ident... more The pronoun "they" can be either plural or singular, perhaps referring to an individual who identifies as nonbinary. How do listeners identify whether "they" has a singular or plural sense? We test the role of explicitly discussing pronouns (e.g., "Alex uses they/them pronouns"). In three experiments, participants read short stories, like "Alex went running with Liz. They fell down." Answers to "Who fell down" indicated whether participants interpreted they as Alex or Alex-and-Liz. We found more singular responses in discourse contexts that make Alex more available: when Alex was either the only person in the context or mentioned first. Critically, the singular interpretation was stronger when participants heard explicit instructions that Alex uses they/them pronouns, even though participants in all conditions had ample opportunity to learn this fact through observation. Results show that the social trend to talk about pronouns has a direct impact on how language is understood.

Glossa Psycholinguistics, 2022

The English pronoun system is undergoing a change in progress as singular they is used more frequ... more The English pronoun system is undergoing a change in progress as singular they is used more frequently to refer to specific individuals, especially those who identify as nonbinary. How does this change affect the language production system? Research has shown that the production of he/she pronouns is supported by salient discourse status and inhibited in contexts where the pronoun would be ambiguous. In an analysis of naturally-occurring written texts, we test whether they production patterns with he/she production, controlling for discourse context. Results show that the overall rate of pronoun use is lower for references to nonbinary individuals than for references to binary individuals. This difference is not explained by the potential ambiguity of a referent in context. We speculate that relative unfamiliarity with nonbinary they and nonbinary gender may inhibit the activation of they during production, or may lead writers to avoid using a form that may not be familiar to their ...

Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2021

Pain refers to "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potentia... more Pain refers to "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage." It is important therefore to understand that pain is more than a simple "ouch" and refers to the emotional, cognitive, and social aspects associated with potentially noxious physical sensations. Therefore, the current entry will focus on responses to tactile, thermal, and chemical stimuli which have the potential to result in unpleasant sensations. This entry will not consider distressing responses to emotional or other sensory experiences; for a review of these, see the entry ▶ "Sensory Processing". To understand both the experience of pain, the expression of pain, and the relationship of these to ASD, it is also important to consider the process by which pain is perceived and then communicated. When considering painful events that start in the periphery (e.g., pain resulting from an injury/tissue damage), it is often possible to see the noxious input, although this is not always the case. This potential noxious input is then communicated along peripheral fibers before reaching the spine, at which time it can be modulated either up or down. Subsequently, in the brain, neural responses to this noxious input are then contextualized with associated suffering to generate a pain percept.

Speakers use pronouns and zeros when referring to information that is topical, recently mentioned... more Speakers use pronouns and zeros when referring to information that is topical, recently mentioned, or salient in the discourse. Although such information is often predictable, there is conflicting evidence about whether predictability affects reference form production. This debate centers on the question of whether reference form is influenced by the predictability of certain thematic roles. While some (Arnold, 2001) argue that referents in certain thematic roles are more likely to be pronominalized, others (Fukumura & van Gompel 2010; Rohde & Kehler, 2014) argue predictability does not play a role in determining referential form. We tested this puzzle in three experiments, using both a richly contextualized production paradigm, and two versions of the standard story-completion paradigm. In all experiments we manipulated the predictability of pairs of characters using Goal-Source verbs. In all three experiments, we found that speakers used more reduced referring expressions when tal...

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2021

Print exposure predicts pronoun comprehension strategies in children

Journal of Child Language, 2019

Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in Panda... more Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in Panda Bear is having lunch with Puppy. He wants a pepperoni slice. Adults tend to link he with Panda Bear, the prior grammatical subject, but young children either fail to exhibit this bias (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, 2007) or do so more slowly than adults (Hartshorne et al., 2015a; Song & Fisher, 2005). In the current study, we test whether language exposure affects this bias in elementary-school-age children. Children listened to stories like the one above, and answered questions like “Who wants a pepperoni slice?” which reveal their pronoun interpretation. Individual variation in the rate of selecting the subject character correlated with measures of print exposure, such that children who read more are more likely to follow the subject bias. This is the first study to establish that print exposure affects spoken pronoun comprehension in children.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2017

Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2015

Pronoun comprehension is facilitated for referents that are focused in the discourse context. Dis... more Pronoun comprehension is facilitated for referents that are focused in the discourse context. Discourse focus has been described as a function of attention, especially shared attention, but few studies have explicitly tested this idea. Two experiments used an exogenous capture cue paradigm to demonstrate that listeners' visual attention at the onset of a story influences their preferences during pronoun resolution later in the story. In both experiments trial-initial attention modulated listeners' transitory biases while considering referents for the pronoun, whether it was in response to the capture cue or not. These biases even had a small influence on listeners' final interpretation of the pronoun. These results provide independently-motivated evidence that the listener's attention influences the on-line processes of pronoun comprehension. Trial-initial attentional shifts were made on the basis of non-shared, private information, demonstrating that attentional eff...

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2000

Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Usi... more Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification

Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, 2003

Brain stimulation

Most studies in which Anodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (A-tDCS) has been used to im... more Most studies in which Anodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (A-tDCS) has been used to improve language production have focused on single words. Yet sentence production requires more than lexical retrieval. For example, successful suppression of the past and careful planning of the future are two critical requirements for producing a correct sentence. Can A-tDCS improves those, and by extension, production at the sentence level? Given that many aspects of sentence production beyond word retrieval require frontally-mediated operations, we hypothesized that A-tDCS to the left prefrontal cortex should benefit various operation involved in producing sentences, two of which, suppression of the past and planning of the future, were targeted in this study. We used a paradigm that elicited construction of sentences through event description, but was structured enough to allow for between-subject comparison, clear error identification, and implementation of experimental manipulations...

Lingua, 2005

Generative grammarians have relied on introspective intuitions of well-formedness as their primar... more Generative grammarians have relied on introspective intuitions of well-formedness as their primary source of data. The overreliance on this one type of data and the unsystematic manner in which they are collected cast doubt on the empirical basis of a great deal of syntactic theorizing. These concerns are illustrated with examples and one more detailed case study, concerning the English verb-particle construction.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2013

Journal of Memory and Language, 2007

Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names i... more Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another character in the discourse decreased pronoun use and increased latencies to refer to the most prominent character in the discourse. In other words, speakers were more likely to call Minnie Minnie than shewhen Donald was also present. Even when the referent character appeared alone in the stimulus picture, the presence of another character in the preceding discourse reduced pronouns. Furthermore, pronoun use varied with features associated with the speaker's degree of focus on the preceding discourse (e.g., narrative style and disfluency). We attribute this effect to competition for attentional resources in the speaker's representation of the discourse.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2004

Discourse Processes, 2001

Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that ha... more Goal and source thematic roles have been shown to influence pronoun resolution, an effect that has been linked to the reader's tendency to focus on the consequences of the event . Using a story continuation experiment, I show that speakers also tend to use pronouns more often for goal entities than source entities. Furthermore, the experiment and a corpus analysis reveal that speakers tend to refer more frequently to goal entities than source entities overall. I use the parallel findings about pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation to argue that referent accessibility is influenced by the comprehender's estimate of the likelihood that a referent will be continued in the discourse. Pronoun comprehension has been argued to be influenced by the accessibility of potential referents in the discourse representation, which is driven by a number of factors (see Arnold, 1998, for a review). One such factor that has received attention is the thematic roles of discourse referents (e.g.

Cognitive Psychology, 2014

A series of experiments explore the effects of attention-directing cues on pronoun resolution, co... more A series of experiments explore the effects of attention-directing cues on pronoun resolution, contrasting four specific hypotheses about the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns he and she: (1) it is driven by grammatical rules, (2) it is primarily a function of social processing of the speaker's intention to communicate, (3) it is modulated by the listener's own egocentric attention, and (4) it is primarily a function of learned probabilistic cues. Experiment 1 demonstrates that pronoun interpretation is guided by the well-known N1 (first-mention) bias, which is also modulated by both the speaker's gaze and pointing gestures. Experiment 2 demonstrates that a low-level visual capture cue has no effect on pronoun interpretation, in contrast with the social cue of pointing. Experiment 3 uses a novel intentional cue: the same attention-capture flash as in Experiment 2, but with instructions that the cue is intentionally created by the speaker. This cue does modulate the N1 bias, demonstrating the importance of information about the speaker's intentions to pronoun resolution. Taken in sum, these findings demonstrate that pronoun resolution is a process best categorized as driven by an appreciation of the speaker's communicative intent, which may be subserved by a sensitivity to predictive cues in the environment.

Cognition, 2008

Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4 and 5 year old children use the presenc... more Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4 and 5 year old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 msec after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children's on-line reference comprehension (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, in press), showing that children's interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object. Learning to understand language involves more than just words and grammatical rules. Children must learn to interpret words and sentences by connecting them with the preceding discourse and the larger context-and to do so very rapidly, as each word and sentence comes at them. This study investigates young children's ability to generate on-line hypotheses about the referent of expressions like the bagel, with a focus on understanding whether children utilize the presence or absence of an accent to guide these hypotheses. Unaccented words tend to refer to information that is highly accessible in the discourse, while accented words tend to refer to less accessible information (e.g., Venditti & Hirschberg, 2003). Research has shown that adults are highly sensitive to this information, and use it rapidly to guide their interpretation of the nominal referring expression (Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002). It is not known how accenting is used by children during reference comprehension. Furthermore, what is known about reference comprehension in children presents conflicting information about their ability to integrate linguistic referring expressions with the discourse context. Reference comprehension and interpretation of accents: Adults When adults interpret spoken referential expressions, they rapidly utilize detailed information about the linguistic expression to identify the most likely referent, This process is embedded in discourse processing mechanisms whereby adults maintain a mental representation of the entities in the current discourse situation (e.g.,

Glossa psycholinguistics, Apr 14, 2024

Two experiments test how college students use nonbinary they to refer to a single and specific pe... more Two experiments test how college students use nonbinary they to refer to a single and specific person whose pronouns are they/them, e.g., "Alex played basketball on the neighborhood court. At one point they made a basket," compared to matched stories about characters with binary (she/her or he/him) pronouns. Experiment 1 shows that for both types of pronouns, people use pronouns more in a one-person than a two-person context. In both experiments, people produce nonbinary they at least as frequently as binary pronouns, suggesting that any difficulty does not result in pronoun avoidance in spoken language, even though it does in written language (Arnold et al., 2022). Nevertheless, there is evidence that nonbinary they is somewhat difficult, in that people made gender errors on about 9% of trials, and they used a more acoustically prominent and disfluent-sounding pronunciation for nonbinary pronouns than binary pronouns. However, exposure to they in the context of the experiment had no effect on frequency, accuracy, or pronunciation of pronouns. This provides the first evidence of how nonbinary they is used in a naturalistic storytelling context and shows that while it poses some minor difficulties, it can be used successfully in a supportive context.