Published in

Frontiers Media, Frontiers in Psychology, (12), 2022

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.672927

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A Bayesian Approach to German Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

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.