Aging and Comprehension of Pronouns: How do Older Adults interpret Pronouns?

Ottens, H. M. (2015) Aging and Comprehension of Pronouns: How do Older Adults interpret Pronouns? Bachelor's Thesis, Artificial Intelligence.

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Abstract

Pronouns are used to replace parts of sentences. But the use of pronouns can cause ambiguity in the listeners interpretation. Many factors govern pronoun resolution, but we focus on two of them: parallel interpretation and grammatical constraints. In this study, older adults (65+) did the same experiment used in Vogelzang et al. (submitted) to test children and young adults. Participants heard short discourses, followed by a question regarding one of the characters. Participants needed to resolve a pronoun to answer this. Results indicate that for older adults the parallel interpretation theory holds. This factor was so strong that it did not matter whether the subject form was a full noun phrase or a pronoun. The form of the sentential object did matter. Participants resolved reflexive objects more consistently than pronoun objects.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis)
Degree programme:	Artificial Intelligence
Thesis type:	Bachelor's Thesis
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	15 Feb 2018 08:09
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2018 08:09
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/13422

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