Which It Is It? Resolving Ambiguous Pronouns: English Teachers Would Be Proud

Thishumorous warning demonstrates a common grammatical error - ambiguouspronouns. Most of the time, common sense kicks in and we know we'resupposed to lock medication in the bathroom cabinet and not the kids.In other instances, however, the clarification of these phrases is notalways so obvious. How we go about removing the ambiguity fromambiguous pronouns without realizing what we are doing is a complexmatter of cognitive processes, both grammatical, referring to the partof speech being mentioned, and order-of-mention, meaning where in thephrase the pronoun is placed.

Juhani Järvikivi, Roger P.G. vanGompel, Jukka Hyönä, and Raymond Bertram tackled this challenge, asreported in the article "Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution" in the April2005 issue of Psychological Science. They found that while bothorder-of-mention and grammatical thought processes significantly affectambiguous pronoun resolution, the grammatical aspect is more important.

Indesigning this study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the FinnishCultural Foundation, the researchers focused on two opposing theoriesof cognition that dispute the resolution, or assignment of ambiguouspronouns. The "first-mention" account states that the preferredantecedent of the ambiguous pronoun is whichever noun phrase comesfirst in the sentence, regardless of its grammatical significance.Conversely, the "subject-preference" account argues that the preferredantecedent is the grammatical subject of the sentence, without takinginto account its placement in the sentence.

Participants in thestudy heard several mini-stories (each mini- story including anambiguous pronoun) as they viewed pictures of the various characters inthe story, while an eye tracker monitored the subject's eye movements.Based on which character the subject's vision fixated upon after themini-story, the researchers could tell which cognitive process was used.

Asit turned out, both processes affected the results; people fixated onthe subject more often than the object, and the first- mentioned nounphrase more than the second. However, the grammatical role wasdemonstrably stronger. This would imply that our brains infer meaningfrom the various parts of speech and that we think in grammaticalterms. Therefore, learned grammar means something to us, even if it isonly subconsciously.

This study's results bring attention to --and refute -- earlier studies by Gernsbacher & Hargreaves (1988)and Carreiras et al. (1995), which claimed that cognitive processesgenerally favor identification with the first-mentioned noun phrase,regardless of grammatical strategies. "Therefore, our results makeclear that one- factor models are inadequate, and that pronounresolution is determined by a delicate interplay of several factors,"the authors wrote.

These findings could have implications thatlearning of grammatical rules is far from outdated and logisticallyuseful. Although traditional styles of teaching grammar like theinfamous sentence-diagramming have gone out of practice, knowing thedifference between a subject and an object may save you some confusionas to the use of the bathroom cabinet.