Work in psycholinguistics continues to demonstrate new ways in which perspective-taking guides language processing. E.g., recent work shows that, in sentences like “Sophie told Amanda that/asked Amanda if she likes learning new languages”, readers use perspective reasoning to judge the ambiguous pronoun as near-categorically referring to the subject antecedent in TELL (because Sophie possesses the relevant knowledge) and the object antecedent in ASK (Amanda’s knowledge). Although these patterns demonstrate a robust perspective effect, could they instead arise from shallow lexical cues provided by TELL/ASK? Experiment 1 rules out lexical-cue explanations by showing that preceding context sentences can compel readers to actually reverse the “default” antecedent judgements for TELL/ASK sentences. Experiment 2 further explores the pragmatic basis of perspective-taking in stand-alone sentences by simply varying character information, e.g., “Susan/Little Susie asked her mom if she likes blueberries”, where Little Susie (a young child) is less likely to know/remember her food preferences.

Authors:

Tiana V. Simovic: University of Toronto; Craig Chambers: University of Toronto