Department of Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, Sorenson Language and Communication Center, Gallaudet University, Washington, DC.
Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2023 Sep 13;66(9):3606-3621. doi: 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00557. Epub 2023 Aug 10.
Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic prominence on pronoun interpretation for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and TD.
Adults with IDD ( = 28) and TD ( = 27) listened to ministories involving a pronoun with two potential antecedents that varied in syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic prominence. Subject/first-mentioned antecedents are more syntactically prominent than object antecedents. Semantic prominence was manipulated via verb transitivity: Subjects are more semantically prominent when the verb is highly transitive (e.g., "hit" vs. "see," a low-transitivity verb for which the subject is merely experiencing the action). Pragmatic prominence was manipulated by placing prosodic focus on one of the two potential antecedents. Eye gaze to images representing the potential antecedents was tracked as a measure of online processing. Responses to a follow-up pronoun interpretation question were also recorded.
Adults with TD used syntactic, semantic, and-in early processing-pragmatic prominence when interpreting ambiguous pronouns. Adults with IDD were sensitive to syntactic prominence but to a significantly lesser extent than their peers with TD.
Pronouns are an integral part of everyday conversation, and when the conversational partners do not share common strategies to link ambiguous pronouns with their antecedents, misunderstandings will occur. Results show that adults with IDD only weakly share pronoun interpretation strategies with adults with TD, suggesting that pronouns may be an important focus for intervention for this population.
代词具有指称上的歧义性；例如，“she”可以指代任何女性。尽管如此，由于说话者和听话者之间隐含地共享了几种策略，因此具有典型发展（TD）的成年人很少会出现代词解释错误。本研究的目的是测试句法、语义和韵律突显对智力和发育障碍（IDD）成年人和 TD 成年人代词解释的影响。
IDD 成人（n=28）和 TD 成人（n=27）听了包含一个代词的小故事，这个代词有两个潜在的先行词，它们在句法、语义和语用方面的突显程度不同。主语/首先提到的先行词比宾语先行词在句法上更突出。语义突显通过动词及物性来操纵：当动词高度及物时（例如，“hit”与“see”，动词的及物性较低，主语只是经历了动作），主语的语义更突出。语用突显通过在两个潜在先行词中的一个上放置韵律焦点来操纵。作为在线处理的一种衡量标准，对代表潜在先行词的图像的眼动追踪。还记录了对后续代词解释问题的回答。
TD 成人在解释歧义代词时使用了句法、语义和-在早期处理中-语用突显。与 TD 同龄人相比，IDD 成人对句法突显敏感，但程度要低得多。
代词是日常对话的一个组成部分，当对话伙伴没有共同的策略将歧义代词与其先行词联系起来时，就会产生误解。结果表明，IDD 成人与 TD 成人仅微弱地共享代词解释策略，这表明代词可能是该人群干预的一个重要焦点。
