A Bayesian Approach to German Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns
Patterson,Clare Schumacher,Petra B. Nicenboim,Bruno Hagen,Johannes Kehler,Andrew
Patterson,Clare
Schumacher,Petra B.
Nicenboim,Bruno
Hagen,Johannes
Kehler,Andrew
Abstract
When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, an addressee must interpret it by identifying a suitable referent. It has been proposed that the interpretation of pronouns can be captured using Bayes’ Rule: P(referent|pronoun) ∝ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). This approach has been successful in English and Mandarin Chinese. In this study, we further the cross-linguistic evidence for the Bayesian model by applying it to German personal and demonstrative pronouns, and provide novel quantitative support for the model by assessing model performance in a Bayesian statistical framework that allows implementation of a fully hierarchical structure, providing the most conservative estimates of uncertainty. Data from two story-continuation experiments showed that the Bayesian model overall made more accurate predictions for pronoun interpretation than production and next-mention biases separately. Furthermore, the model accounts for the demonstrative pronoun dieser as well as the personal pronoun, despite the demonstrative having different, and more rigid, resolution preferences.
Description
Funding Information: The research for this study has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 281511265 – SFB 1252 “Prominence in Language” in the project C07 “Forward and backward functions of discourse anaphora” at the University of Cologne, Department of German Language und Literature I, Linguistics. Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2022 Patterson, Schumacher, Nicenboim, Hagen and Kehler.
Date
2022-03-03
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Keywords
Bayesian model, demonstratives, prominence, pronouns, reference
Citation
Patterson, C, Schumacher, P B, Nicenboim, B, Hagen, J & Kehler, A 2022, 'A Bayesian Approach to German Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns', Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 672927, pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672927