Investigating individual variation in reference production and comprehension
Petra Hendriks (Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen)
A challenge
for many accounts of reference in language is the observation that language
users vary considerably in their referential choices, such as the choice
between a definite expression and an overt pronoun in sentence production or
the choice between various potential antecedents for a pronoun in sentence
comprehension. Part of the variation observed among and within language users
and across tasks may be explained from variation in the cognitive resources
available to the speaker or listener, for example working memory capacity,
inhibition skills, and theory of mind abilities. This course will consider a
number of ways in which the interaction between linguistic constraints and general
cognitive constraints can be investigated, namely by theoretical modeling, psycholinguistic
experimentation relating linguistic and cognitive tasks or testing special populations,
and computational cognitive modeling, and discuss what we can learn from these.