Underspecified <i>they</i> becomes specified early in sentence processing
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We investigated underspecification in sentence processing, using the ambiguous pronoun they as a case study. We asked whether they is processed as underspecified for number, and probed into when it acquires its number specification in incremental processing. A key question we address is whether underspecification is due to the fact that the pronoun is lexically underspecified for number or due to shallow processing. Based on the findings from an acceptability judgment study and two reading time studies using the Maze task, we conclude that they is lexically underspecified for number and that the processor homes in on a more enriched specification of they early, soon after it links with its antecedent and before fully disambiguating material is encountered. The data suggest that readers will develop detailed commitments to semantic representations for ambiguous expressions early in processing. We discuss how this finding stands in contrast to underspecified plural definite descriptions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it