Search

The general view in syntactic literature is that binding constraints can make antecedents syntactically inaccessible. However, several studies showed that antecedents which are ruled out by syntactic binding constraints still influence online processing of anaphora in some stages, suggesting that a cue-based retrieval mechanism plays a role during anaphora resolution. As in the syntactic literature, in semantic accounts like Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), formal constraints are formulated in terms of accessibility of the antecedent. We explore the discourse inaccessibility postulated in DRT by looking at its role in pronoun resolution of inter-sentential anaphoric relations in four off-line and two eye-tracking experiments. The results of the eye-tracking experiments suggest that accessibility has an effect on pronoun resolution from early on. The study quantifies evidence of inaccessible antecedents affecting pronoun resolution and shows that almost all evidence points to the conclusion that discourse-inaccessible antecedents are ruled out for pronoun resolution in processing. The only potential counter-example to this claim is also detected, but remains only as anecdotal evidence even after combining data from both eye-tracking studies. The findings in the study show that accessibility plays a significant role in the processing of pronoun resolution in a way which is potentially challenging for the cue-based retrieval mechanism. The paper argues that discourse accessibility can help expand the theories of retrieval beyond the syntactic and sentence-level domain and provides a window into the study of interference in discourse.

This work explores the interaction between pragmatic reasoning and concept learning. Specifically, it examines how reasoning about a speaker’s intentions influences concept learning, as well as how learners’ beliefs about the meanings of novel words interact when those words are known to have distinct meanings. The study comprises an experiment where participants learn two concepts simultaneously, involving the elicitation of conversational implicatures. The experimental results are then used to fit cognitive models. The model for pragmatics being used is the Lexical Uncertainty Model, which is based on the Rational Speech Act framework. This is a Bayesian model, where hypotheses about concept meanings need to be clearly defined in order to evaluate whether experimental observations (such as seeing trials’ feedback) support them. This is where Languages of Thought prove useful, as they account for concepts being realized through compositions of symbols, thereby allowing hypotheses about concept meanings to be represented as logical expressions. The experimental results provide no clear indication that participants engage in conversational implicatures, whereas the cognitive models including pragmatic reasoning do not exhibit a significantly better fit with the experimental data. Nevertheless, these results should be considered preliminary, as the participant pool was very limited, and individuals capable of the required pragmatic reasoning for this task are uncommon. Furthermore, there is still a vast margin of improvement on the methodologies, given the complexity of the study.

This target article presents a type-theoretic dynamic inquisitive semantics framework, extending the first-order system presented in (Dotlačil, Jakub & Floris Roelofsen. 2019. Dynamic inquisitive semantics: Anaphora and questions. Sinn und Bedeutung 23. 365–382). Within this framework, we develop a compositional treatment of wh-questions whose basic premise is that a wh-phrase introduces a discourse referent u, just like non-interrogative indefinites do, and requires the presence of an operator in the left periphery of the clause which requests a witness for u, i.e., it raises an issue whose resolution requires identifying at least one individual that has all the properties ascribed to u. In previous work, it has been argued that a dynamic semantic analysis of questions is needed to account for anaphora with wh-antecedents and for certain kinds of intervention effects (Haida, Andreas. 2007. The indefiniteness and focusing of wh-words. Berlin: Humboldt University PhD thesis). Here, we further develop the general approach and argue that it has several additional benefits. Namely, it allows for a uniform treatment of single-wh and multiple-wh questions, it derives mention-some and mention-all readings in a principled way, as well as an often neglected partial mention-some reading in multiple-wh questions, it can capture certain constraints on the availability of mention-some readings, and the effects of number marking on which-phrases across single-wh and multiple-wh questions.

Number agreement attraction in comprehension has been extensively studied in various languages and it has been claimed that attraction effects are generally present across languages. In this paper, four experiments on Czech are presented, each examining a different structure. The Bayesian hierarchical models and Bayes factor analysis pointed towards no agreement attraction effects in three of the experiments. Only in one experiment an effect interpretable as signaling agreement attraction was observed. Its size, however, was so small that it did not translate into a clear preference for models with agreement attraction. The data from the four experiments were further compared to available data from several other languages (English, Armenian, Arabic, and Spanish). The emerging picture is that in Czech, agreement attraction effects are negligible in size if they appear at all. This presents a serious challenge to current theoretical explanations of agreement attraction effects.

This chapter presents semantic frameworks that model the general capability of language to refer to atomic, as well as non-atomic entities. Two approaches are developed and discussed in detail throughout the chapter: a set-theoretic approach and an approach in which entities are modelled as atomic and plural individuals. After the formal introduction of the two approaches, the chapter shows how number marking in language can be represented and how other concepts related to semantic number, in particular, distributivity, cumulativity and collectivity, have been analysed in formal semantic theories.

Readers skip about 20-30% of the words they read (Rayner, 2009; Schotter et al., 2012). Due to having better lexical representations of words, better readers are thought to skip words more frequently than worse readers (Eskenazi & Folk, 2015). In this paper, a literature review is made of this hypothesis, looking at what influences skipping rates, and how reader skill could modulate this. Then EZ-Reader is explained, a mathematical model that models human reading behavior (Reichle et al., 2003). Subsequently, this model is used to run simulations on the GECO corpus (Cop et al., 2016), where simulation results are compared with empirical results for monolinguals (high-skill readers) and bilinguals (low-skill readers). Measures were taken of the total skipping rate and skipping rates for both low- and high-frequency words. There are conclusive findings that EZ-Reader can not account for reader skill modulation of skipping rates in the current implementation. Low-frequency skipping rates are predicted to be much higher than the empirical results for low-skill readers. The implications of these results are discussed, as well as their relevance towards AI.

Readers experience processing difficulties in multiple situations. Two theories regarding processing difficulties are the dependency locality theory and the surprisal theory. These theories explain processing difficulty in a contradicting manner. Both effects in the theories have been proven to exist. In order to accurately model reading behaviour, a model has to implement the effects in the correct situation. The ACT-R model tries to mimics this reading behaviour. A corpus of 20 sentences from other researches and eight self-constructed sentences is used to test if the model experiences the same word processing difficulties. The model’s performance showed some discrepancies in which some aspects of the theories were correctly modelled and some were not. This shows that the ACT-R model has useful properties in modelling reading behaviour, but is susceptible to improvements.