Referential Choice: Predictability and Its Limits

The production of referring expressions is influenced by the likelihood of next mention

The present study provides converging evidence across three next-mention biases that likelihood of coreference influences the choice of referring expression: implicit causality (IC), the goal bias of transfer-of-possession (ToP) verbs, and implicit consequentiality (I-Cons). A pilot study and four experiments investigated coreference production in German using a forced-reference paradigm. The pilot study used object- and subject-biased IC verbs, showing a statistically marginal influence of next-mention bias on referential expressions, albeit mediated by grammatical function and feature overlap between antecedents. Experiment 1 focused on these features for object reference with ToP verbs, showing effects of coreference bias. In a within-participants comparison, Experiment 2 showed comparable effects for two classes of IC verbs, stimulus-experiencer and experiencer-stimulus predicates. Experiment 3 replicated and extended the IC form effects to another verb class, agent-evocator verbs. Finally, Experiment 4 revealed effects on anaphoric form also for I-Cons, while simultaneously replicating the effect observed for IC.

Latent semantic analysis for tagging activation states and identifiability in northwestern Mexican news outlets

The present work aims to study the relationship between measures, obtained from Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and a variant known as SPAN, and activation and identifiability states (Informative States) of referents in noun phrases present in journalistic notes from Northwestern Mexican news outlets written in Spanish. The aim and challenge is to find a strategy to achieve labelling of new / given information in the discourse rooted in a theoretically linguistic stance. The new / given distinction can be defined from different perspectives in which it varies what linguistic forms are taken into account. Thus, the focus in this work is to work with full referential devices (n = 2 388). Pearson’s R correlation tests, analysis of variance, graphical exploration of the clustering of labels, and a classification experiment with random forests are performed. For the experiment, two groups were used: noun phrases labeled with all 10 tags of informative states and a binary labelling, as well as the use of two bags-of-words for each noun phrase: the interior and the exterior. It was found that using LSA in conjunction with the inner bag of words can be used to classify certain informational states. This same measure showed good results for the binary division, detecting which sentences introduce new referents in discourse. In previous work using a similar method in noun phrases in English, 80% accuracy (n = 478) was reached in their classification exercise. Our best test for Spanish reached 79%. No work on Spanish using this method has been done before and this kind of experiment is important because Spanish exhibits a more complex inflectional morphology.

Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages

By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However, this speed is not constant-speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. We attribute this slowdown effect to the increased amount of planning that nouns require compared with verbs. Unlike verbs, nouns can typically only be used when they represent new or unexpected information; otherwise, they have to be replaced by pronouns or be omitted. These conditions on noun use appear to outweigh potential advantages stemming from differences in internal complexity between nouns and verbs. Our findings suggest that, beneath the staggering diversity of grammatical structures and cultural settings, there are robust universals of language processing that are intimately tied to how speakers manage referential information when they communicate with one another.