Pronoun interpretation in Mandarin Chinese follows principles of Bayesian inference
Name
pone.0237012.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.54 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5590bb7f1b15db7497c2191865b2dbce
Author(s)
Zhan, Meilin
Levy, Roger P
Kehler, Andrew
Date Issued
August 2020
Journal
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Citation
Zhan, Meilin et al. "Pronoun interpretation in Mandarin Chinese follows principles of Bayesian inference." PLoS ONE 15, 8 (August 2020): e0237012 © 2020 Zhan et al.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Successful natural language understanding requires that comprehenders be able to resolve uncertainty in language. One source of potential uncertainty emerges from a speaker’s choice to use a pronoun (e.g., he, she, they), since pronouns often do not fully specify the speaker’s intended referent. Nevertheless, comprehenders are typically able to interpret pronouns rapidly despite having limited cognitive resources. Here we report three pronoun interpretation experiments that investigate whether comprehenders reverse-engineer a speaker’s referential intentions based on Bayesian principles, as documented in previous studies for English. Using Mandarin Chinese, we test the generality of the Bayesian pronoun interpretation theory, and further evaluate the predictions of the theory in ways that are not possible in English. Our results lend both qualitative and quantitative support to a cross-linguistically general Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237012
