| Summary: | All participants were adults who were native speakers of any variety of English. The study was conducted in October 2015 in the Language and Brain Lab, University of Oxford.
Procedure
The participant was sat down in front of a laptop on a table. On the screen they saw several stick figure characters, who were presented in different scenes with different objects.
At the beginning of the experiment, the participant was introduced to each of the characters and to a narrator. The narrator was also present on every screen, and he reported what different characters had said about the pictures. The participant heard sentences like “John said that he’s wearing a red swimsuit, is John right?”, and they would check what was going on in the picture to verify what John reportedly said. These prompts were in turn split between declarative sentences (John said that he’s wearing a red swimsuit) and quotations (John said, “he’s wearing a red swimsuit”), to see if adults have consistent and correct interpretations in both kinds of sentences.
Data description
Subject:
24 subjects, all adult native speakers of English.
Item number:
Each participant saw 24 items.
Item list:
There were 4 counterbalanced item lists, each having 24 items. Each participant only saw one list.
Item:
Each story about the characters focused on a different item.
Embedded subject:
This is the value of the first independent variable. The subject could have been either embedded 1st person, embedded 3rd person or embedded named person (Sally).
Type of sentence:
This is the second independent variable. Possible values are embedded or quotative.
Target answer:
This is the target answer to the question in the stimuli. Possible values are either true or false.
Participant's response:
This is the participant's answer, either true or false.
Accuracy:
This shows the match between the target answer and the participant's answer. Value is 1 if it is a match or 0 if it is not a match. This study aims to explore how language is understood and how adult speakers determine the correct meaning for pronouns (e.g. I, you, he). When we hear pronouns we use both context and restrictions particular to the language we are speaking to determine who a pronoun refers to. For example, in English "I" must always refer to the speaker, unless it is used in a quotation. This is not the case in every language. Therefore, the main aim of our research is to explore when children are able to use both context and language specific factors to interpret pronouns the way adults do. Before exploring how children interpret these pronouns, the current study is looking into whether adults interpret those pronouns as predicted and whether our study is well-designed to capture that.
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