Changes in Pronoun Use a Decade before Clinical Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Dementia-Linguistic Contexts Suggest Problems in Perspective-Taking.

The use of pronouns has been shown to change pathologically in the early phases of Alzheimer's Dementia (AD). So far, the findings have been of a quantitative nature. Little is known, however, about the developmental path of the change, its onset, the domains in which it initially occurs, and if and how it spreads to other linguistic domains.

The adversative connectives aber and but in conversational corpora.

We analyzed the conversational corpora of two German and two English children to investigate how the different use types of the adversative connectives aber and but influence the probability of monologically versus dialogically constructed utterances in the first year of use. Our findings show that children produce adversative connectives mainly in dialogic structures for illocutionary and theme-management purposes, but that the use types of adversative connectives lead to a different distribution of monologic and dialogic clause combinations. The results suggest that monologic and dialogic realizations as a function of text type must be considered when describing the developmental trajectory of the different use types of adversative connectives.

Time and Causation in Discourse: Temporal Proximity, Implicit Causality, and Re-mention Biases.

Using referential processing in discourse featuring implicit causality verbs as a test case, we demonstrate how a discourse's causal and temporal dimensions interact. We show that referential processing is affected by multiple discourse biases, and that these biases do not have uniform effects. In three discourse continuation experiments, we show that the bias to re-mention a particular referent in discourse involving implicit causality verbs is not only affected by the verb's implicit causality bias, but also by the discourse's temporal structure, which at times, can even override the implicit causality bias.