Bookshelf 📖

Current Title: Animacy, Empathy Locus, and Logophoricity: An Individual-Differences Analysis of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Mandarin Chinese

My thoughts

S Kuno empthy and syntax, 1970

• Empathy and direct
• empathy verb (fear, haipa) = experiencer = x amazed y = caused y to experience it, x feared y = stimulis
  • Se and es verb
• Source and previser verb
• Typology bethelion = se and es verbs
• How we are going to define empathy?
  • A good definition of empathy.
  • Se and es verb will be interesting start point
• Psych verb literature = stimulis and experiences
• Someone experienced the emotion = expereincer = we tend to emphasize with that experimenter = empathy locus will refer to it
• Comment in class = collective noun

Researching on verbal working memory and digit span memory

• What people are currently using for testing
• Handbook in psychology, and read around google scholar

animacy = should leave it out

Individual differences in sentence processing

Think about what is the hypothesis, why it’s exciting for a linguist to look at ASD and working memory type of questions?

• individual variation in working memory (Cunnings & Felser, 2013) and reading speed (Yadav et al., 2022) and activation decay of antecedents (King et al., 2012).
• Zribi-Hertz (1989) (also see Pollard & Sag, 1998, 2001) showed that literary British English allows empathic readings of himself/herself when the non-local antecedent is an empathy locus
• Two real-time processing studies (Kaiser et al., 2009; Sloggett, 2017) suggest that logophoricity seems to modulate reflexive resolution
• in the studies of Wang (2017a,b) and Lu (2011), the reflexives are in subject positions which are susceptible to emphatic readings (e.g., Pan, 1995; Xu, 1999).
• According to research on exempt anaphors, attitude holders and empathy loci license exempt reading of reflexives (e.g., Charnavel & Zlogar, 2015; Charnavel, 2020, 2021).
• In fact, this finding is consistent with Pan and Wang’s view (e.g., Pan, 2001; Wang & Pan, 2014, 2105a,b), namely, ziji is primarily empathic

Keep it simple

current research questions

1. How syntactic factors (e.g., locality) and non-syntactic factors (e.g., logophoricity, empathy) impact reflexive resolution in Chinese?
   • Does the empathy locus and the discourse role (e.g., source vs. perceiver) of the perspective center impact LD binding of ziji?
   • Does the locality impact LD binding of ziji?
   • Which of the two processing models (cue-based model, structure-based model) do the results support?
2. Do individual differences play a role in the binding of ziji?

My thoughts

• design? 2 x 2 (logophoricity verb in the subject position)
• 张三 告诉 别人 [李四 害怕 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] ES + Source
• 张三 听说 [李四 害怕 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] ES + Perceiver
• 张三 告诉 别人 [李四 侮辱 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] se + Source
• 张三 听说 [李四 侮辱 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] Se + Perceiver
• empathy verb (se and es verb), logphoricity verb (source verb (tell, gaosu), preceiver verb (hear, tingshuo))
• design? 2 x 2 (logophoricity verb in the object position)
• 张三 害怕 [李四 告诉 别人 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] ES + Source
• 张三 害怕 [李四 听说 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] ES + Perceiver
• 张三 侮辱 [李四 告诉 别人 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] se + Source
• 张三 侮辱 [李四 听说 自己 的 老板 不 负 责任] Se + Perceiver

Competition between Empathy, Logophor, and animacy hierarchies

Overall: Syntactic constraint (binding) vs. Non-syntax constraints (empathy, logophoricity, and animacy)

Empathic = Empathy locus, a person whose perspective the speaker takes (perspective-taking, empathizes with the LD antecedent)

Logophoric = speech initiators or sources = reporting/perceiving

differences: Logophoricity is related to the notion of perspective-reporting, while empathy is related to the notion of perspective-taking

Based on previous research from theoretical work, which shows that ziji is both empathic and logophoric, and from experimental work, Liu (2020) found that ziji is logophoric, while Xue & Runner (submitted) found that ziji is not logophoric.

1. Empathy hierarchy (Hu, 2019)

• Empathy verb > non-empathy verb (source and perciver verbs)

Speech Act Empathy Hierarchy (Kuno, 1987: 212)

• The speaker cannot empathize with someone else more than with himself (speaker只能对自己更empathize比起其他人)

2. Logophority hierarchy

• Source > Self > Pivot (Huang & Liu, 2001)
• Speech > thought > knowledge > direct perception (Culy, 1994; 1062)
• overall: source > preceiver

3. Animacy hierarchy in grammar and typology (Ji & Liang, 2018)

Animacy hierarchy within inanimate nouns (Ji & Liang, 2018)

• collective nouns > spatial and temporal nouns > concrete nouns > psychological nouns > other abstract nouns

4. Empathy x Logophority x Animacy Hierarchy (Hu, 2019)

• Empathy hierarchy (empathy verb, source verb, preceiver verb) > Animacy hierarchy (animate + human, animate nouns, inanimate nouns)
• Animate + human noun > animate noun > inanimate noun

Hypothesis

• Then it shows that if the empathy x logophority x animacy hierarchy (Hu, 2019) is true, then a faster reaction time for the empathy verb compared to the source and preceiver verb
• If the animacy hierarchy is true, then animate + human nouns have faster reaction times than animate -human nouns
• then we expect:
  • fastest reaction time to the empathy and animate +human noun condition
  • lowest reaction time to the perceiver and inanimate noun condition

Another Empathy Hierarchy and its interaction with Animacy (Langacker, 1991:306–307)

• Empathy hierarchy: speaker (source?) > hearer (preciever?) > human (names) > animal > physical object > abstract entity (collective nouns)
  • tends to empathize with the speaker, then the hearer, then the human, then the collective nouns

Central question from Jun:

• whether syntactic information is prioritized over non-syntactic information (e.g., gender, number, animacy) in early-stage processing
  1. the standard cue-based retrieval model (e.g., Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Van Dyke & McElree, 2006; Chen et al., 2012; Jäger et al., 2015; Patil et al., 2016)
  2. the structure-based retrieval model (e.g., Sturt, 2003; Xiang et al., 2009; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011; Dillon et al., 2013; Cunnings & Sturt, 2014; Parker & Phillips, 2017)

My thoughts

• 3 x 2 design?
• empathy verb (fear, haipa), source verb (tell, gaosu), preceiver verb (hear, tingshuo)
• animate noun, collective noun (John, university)
  • ziji may be more likely to bound with singular nouns like john, and if we do not add another level of plural nouns, this might be a part of nature for the collective noun, since they may be plural by nature, and this may be a confounding variable.
  • questions: collective plural noun

Before experiment (norming?)

• ask participants to rate the animacy AND plurality of the nouns first from 1-10 to create a gradient effect, because some collective nouns may be more animate than others, then select the top-rated collective nouns from the survey

experiment

• reaction time
  • Self-paced reading
• individual difference in 2 domains
  1. Cognitive processing style
     • ASQ
     • Big five personabilities?
  2. working memory capacity
     • working memory? Even though they did not find a significance, but based on their research seems to be relevant, also it has an effect on language processing.
• working memory capacity (WMC): the ability to control attention and deal with irrelevant information, and not simply the amount of information that can reside in working memory. = individual differences are not due to some limited amount of activation available to the working memory system, but to an individual’s ability to ignore irrelevant information (on the basis of a specific relevant goal) through the control of attention
• Individuals with lower WMC are less able to utilize executive control to ignore irrelevant or interfering information and maintain focus on a specific goal. whereas the opposite is true for high-WMC individuals.
• Working memory has an effect on speech processing.
  • Increasing WM load has been shown to slow down spoken word recognition, high working memory individuals show less perceptual compensation for coarticulation and are less biased toward hearing legal sound sequences than low working memory individuals.