Jennifer Arnold | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Jennifer Arnold

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, May 4, 2021

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

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

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

Cognition, 2017

We examined the relationship between the timing of utterance initiation and the choice of referri... more We examined the relationship between the timing of utterance initiation and the choice of referring expressions, e.g., pronouns (it), zeros (…and went down), or descriptive NPs (the pink pentagon). We examined language production in healthy adults, and used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test the involvement of the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the timing of utterance production and the selection of reference forms in a discourse context. Twenty-two subjects (11 anodal, 11sham) described fast-paced actions, e.g. The gray oval flashes, then it moves right 2 blocks. We only examined trials in contexts that supported pronoun/zero use. For sham participants, pronouns/zeros increased on trials with longer latencies to initiate the target utterance, and trials where the previous trial was short. We argue that both of these conditions enabled greater message pre-planning and greater discourse connectedness: The strongest predictor of pronoun/zero usage was the p...

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...