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Texts about fictional characters are often written in a third person singular (3SG) perspective. In a self-paced reading study, Child et al. (2018) found that emotional information is processed more easily when the narrative uses second person singular (2SG) rather than 3SG. In the current study, we explore how 2SG and 3SG are processed in Dutch. Because Dutch is a language with a formal-informal distinction in 2SG, we also contrast formal 2SG-V (e.g., u, 'you') to informal 2SG-T (e.g., jij, 'you') forms. We find a main effect of perspective on target processing, with 2SG read faster than 3SG. In contrast, spillover regions (three words following the target) are read slower following 2SG than 3SG, and spillover regions were read slower following 2SG-V than following 2SG-T. This means that processing emotional narratives through a 2SG perspectives induces a processing cost compared to 3SG perspectives, and this increases with formal 2SG.

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with speakers of Dutch (N = 84, 36 male), a language that falls between grammatical and natural-gender languages. We tested whether a masculine generic pronoun causes a male bias when used in generic statements--that is, in the absence of a specific referent. We tested two types of generic statements by varying conceptual number, hypothesizing that the pronoun "zijn" "his" was more likely to cause a male bias with a conceptually singular than a conceptually plural antecedent (e.g., "Someone" (conceptually singular)/"Everyone" (conceptually plural) "with perfect pitch can tune his instrument quickly"). We found male participants to exhibit a male bias but with the conceptually singular antecedent only. Female participants showed no signs of a male bias. The results show that the generically intended masculine pronoun "zijn" "his" leads to a male bias in conceptually singular generic contexts but that this further depends on participant gender.

Studies of perception have long shown that the brain adds information to its sensory analysis of the physical environment. A touchstone example for humans is language use: to comprehend a physical signal like speech, the brain must add linguistic knowledge, including syntax. Yet, syntactic rules and representations are widely assumed to be atemporal (i.e., abstract and not bound by time), so they must be translated into time-varying signals for speech comprehension and production. Here, we test 3 different models of the temporal spell-out of syntactic structure against brain activity of people listening to Dutch stories: an integratory bottom-up parser, a predictive top-down parser, and a mildly predictive left-corner parser. These models build exactly the same structure but differ in when syntactic information is added by the brain—this difference is captured in the (temporal distribution of the) complexity metric "incremental node count." Using temporal response function models with both acoustic and information-theoretic control predictors, node counts were regressed against source-reconstructed delta-band activity acquired with magnetoencephalography. Neural dynamics in left frontal and temporal regions most strongly reflect node counts derived by the top-down method, which postulates syntax early in time, suggesting that predictive structure building is an important component of Dutch sentence comprehension. The absence of strong effects of the left-corner model further suggests that its mildly predictive strategy does not represent Dutch language comprehension well, in contrast to what has been found for English. Understanding when the brain projects its knowledge of syntax onto speech, and whether this is done in language-specific ways, will inform and constrain the development of mechanistic models of syntactic structure building in the brain. Comprehending spoken language requires the encoding of information beyond what is presented in the raw speech signals. Using MEG recordings during natural story listening, this study shows that the human brain projects its knowledge of syntax onto speech in a predictive and language-dependent way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature has examined the effect of using a formal or informal second-person pronoun on consumers' appreciation of an advertisement and the advertised product and their purchase intention. This is the first study that additionally examines the effect of the use of either pronoun on product price estimation. In a between-subjects web experiment, Dutch participants evaluated product ads in which either an informal or formal pronoun of address was used, or no pronoun of address at all (the control condition). Dependent variables were attitude towards the ad and the product, purchase intention, and price estimation. The results show that the use of the formal pronoun leads to a higher estimate of the price of the advertised product, while a higher price estimate may increase the purchase intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does it matter whether charitable organizations address potential donors with an informal or formal second-person pronoun in their appeal to donate money? This study shows that it does indeed make a difference. Using an informal pronoun of address can have a positive effect on intentions to donate money. An online experiment (n = 220) found that a charitable appeal to potential donors was more effective when an informal rather than a formal second-person pronoun was used in Dutch, particularly for altruistic people. We discuss the potential explanations of this effect, concentrating on the association between the informal pronoun of address and perceived closeness, and the generic versus deictic reference of informal pronouns of address in Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show by means of a corpus study that the language used by the inanimate first person narrator in the novel Specht en zoon deviates from what we would expect on the basis of the fact that the narrator is inanimate, but at the same time also differs from the language of a human narrator in the novel De wijde blik on several linguistic dimensions. Whereas the human narrator is associated strongly with action verbs, preferring the Agent role, the inanimate narrator is much more limited to the Experiencer role, predominantly associated with cognition and sensory verbs. Our results show that animacy as a linguistic concept may be refined by taking into account the myriad ways in which an entity’s conceptual animacy may be expressed: we accept the conceptual animacy of the inanimate narrator despite its inability to act on its environment, showing this need not be a requirement for animacy.

Directly addressing the consumer in advertisements has a positive impact on their perception of the product. Dutch, however, makes a distinction between a formal and an informal second person pronoun. If and how this distinction impacts consumers' appreciation in and beyond advertising has not received much attention. Quantifying consumers' appreciation in terms of the attitude toward the advertisement and toward the product, purchase intention, and price estimation, we show experimentally that customers' attitude toward the advertisement receives higher scores when the informal pronoun is used than when its formal counterpart is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be interpreted referentially in most contexts, even in contexts where adults would favor a nonreferential reading. In this article we offer an explanation for this pattern within the framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory. This explanation focuses on clarifying in what sense children's interpretations deviate from the adult interpretations and clarifying the nature of the linguistic knowledge that the 4-year-old child will need to acquire to become a competent, adultlike speaker and hearer of her language.

Byline: Paula Fikkert; Helen de Hoop Abstract In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of affairs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. Article History: Date received: May 24, 2005 Date revision received: January 25, 2008