Evidence shows that readers tend to follow recently-encountered patterns for interpreting ambiguous pronouns. If recent exposure includes frequent pronouns with prepositional object antecedents ...(e.g., “Matt went to the library with Ana. She took out a book”), people adapt and are more likely to assign ambiguous pronouns to prepositional antecedents than if they were exposed to pronouns with subject antecedents (Johnson & Arnold, 2022). However, it is unclear how people categorize different referential structures and how broadly they make generalizations. Johnson and Arnold (2022) found that people can learn a referential relationship specific to third-person pronouns and an antecedent's syntactic or thematic properties. The current study uses this paradigm to test how broadly people generalize categories of different types of pronouns and antecedents. Do people adapt to the behavior of categorizing “he” and “she” as individual words, or as a general class? (Experiment 1). Do people learn about likely antecedents for pronouns separately for different verb constructions (transfer vs. joint-action) and thematic roles, or broadly by grammatical function? (Experiments 2 & 3). Participants were repeatedly exposed to a referential structure of a particular type of pronouns or antecedents, and then were tested on ambiguous pronouns. All experiments showed that pronoun adaptation generalizes to new instances from the broad categorization of pronouns and antecedents.
•Provide robust evidence that referential adaptation guides pronoun comprehension.•Adaptation to he/she generalizes to each other with no advantage to comprehension of matching word.•Referential adaptation generalizes across different antecedent categories.
In three experiments, we measured individual patterns of pronoun comprehension (Experiments 1 and 2) and referential prediction (Experiment 3) in implicit causality (IC) contexts and compared these ...with a measure of participants’ print exposure (Author Recognition Task; ART). Across all three experiments, we found that ART interacted with verb bias, such that participants with higher scores demonstrated a stronger semantic bias, i.e., they tended to select the pronoun or predict the re-mention of the character that was congruent with an implicit cause interpretation. This suggests that print exposure changes the way language is processed at the discourse level, and in particular, that it is related to implicit cause sensitivity.
•The IL-36 family of cytokines includes three pro-inflammatory agonists (IL-36α, IL-36β, and IL-36γ) and a receptor antagonist (IL-36Ra).•Signaling through the IL-36 receptor induces expression of ...antimicrobial peptides and pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines by keratinocytes and immune cells.•IL-36 is a driver of inflammation in several mouse models of inflammatory skin disease.•Dysregulated IL-36 pathway activation has been linked to inflammatory skin diseases including various forms of psoriasis, hidradenitis suppurativa, atopic dermatitis, and allergic contact dermatitis.
The IL-36 family of cytokines includes three pro-inflammatory agonists (IL-36α, IL-36β, and IL-36γ) and a receptor antagonist (IL-36Ra), which bind and signal through a heterodimeric receptor composed of IL-36R and the IL-1R accessory protein (IL-1RAcP). Individuals with inactivating mutations in the gene encoding IL-36Ra develop generalized pustular psoriasis, a severe form of psoriasis, a finding which clearly links dysregulated IL-36 pathway activation to inflammatory skin conditions. The purpose of this review is to highlight the cellular source of IL-36 cytokines, the effects of IL-36 signaling across cell types, and the association of IL-36 to a spectrum of inflammatory skin diseases including various forms of psoriasis as well as hidradenitis suppurativa, atopic dermatitis, and allergic contact dermatitis.
One of the core components of language is referring, which requires the speaker to choose between expressions that are highly explicit (e.g., the UNC professor, or Peter), and reduced lexical forms ...(e.g., he). This paper reviews claims that this process is largely driven by the accessibility or salience of the referent, and the psychological processes that underlie these effects. Two classes of constraint are examined: (1) Discourse status, which has traditionally been identified as the determinant of referential choices and (2) Non‐linguistic processing constraints that increase the use of explicit forms. These effects together support a modified version of the traditional claim that speakers choose referential explicitness so that the listener can identify the referent, and underscore the need for accessibility to be mediated by a non‐linguistic representation.
Ribonucleoside analogues have potential utility as anti-viral, -parasitic, -bacterial and -cancer agents. However, their clinical applications have been limited by off target effects. Development of ...antiviral ribonucleosides for treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection has been hampered by appearance of toxicity during clinical trials that evaded detection during preclinical studies. It is well established that the human mitochondrial DNA polymerase is an off target for deoxyribonucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Here we test the hypothesis that triphosphorylated metabolites of therapeutic ribonucleoside analogues are substrates for cellular RNA polymerases. We have used ribonucleoside analogues with activity against HCV as model compounds for therapeutic ribonucleosides. We have included ribonucleoside analogues containing 2'-C-methyl, 4'-methyl and 4'-azido substituents that are non-obligate chain terminators of the HCV RNA polymerase. We show that all of the anti-HCV ribonucleoside analogues are substrates for human mitochondrial RNA polymerase (POLRMT) and eukaryotic core RNA polymerase II (Pol II) in vitro. Unexpectedly, analogues containing 2'-C-methyl, 4'-methyl and 4'-azido substituents were inhibitors of POLRMT and Pol II. Importantly, the proofreading activity of TFIIS was capable of excising these analogues from Pol II transcripts. Evaluation of transcription in cells confirmed sensitivity of POLRMT to antiviral ribonucleosides, while Pol II remained predominantly refractory. We introduce a parameter termed the mitovir (mitochondrial dysfunction caused by antiviral ribonucleoside) score that can be readily obtained during preclinical studies that quantifies the mitochondrial toxicity potential of compounds. We suggest the possibility that patients exhibiting adverse effects during clinical trials may be more susceptible to damage by nucleoside analogs because of defects in mitochondrial or nuclear transcription. The paradigm reported here should facilitate development of ribonucleosides with a lower potential for toxicity.
There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how ...people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential tokens can be multiply categorized, raising questions about what can be learned through referential exposure. We test the role of linguistic exposure to referential patterns in five experiments on pronoun comprehension, examining linguistic contexts like "X is doing something with Y" (Experiments 1a, b, and c) and transfer events like "X gave something to Y" (Experiments 2a and b). We ask whether the interpretation of ambiguous he or she pronouns is influenced by recent exposure and find that indeed it is, supporting the hypothesis that adaptation affects discourse processing. In Experiment 1, we further ask whether adaptation persists across three types of referring expressions (he or she pronouns, I/you pronouns, and names) and find that it is limited to he or she pronouns. In Experiment 2, we test whether people can learn both syntactically conditioned and semantically conditioned frequency patterns with transfer verbs. Results showed that they learned both patterns. These results provide critical new evidence that discourse processing biases are informed by exposure to referential patterns.
Models of language comprehension show that predictable elements are easier to understand. Does predictability also guide production? While many models suggest it does (e.g., Arnold, 1998; Aylett & ...Turk, 2004; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, & Raymond, 2001; Mahowald, Fedorenko, Piantadosi, & Gibson; Orita, Vornov, Feldman & Daumé, 2015; Tily & Piantadosi, 2009), several models suggest that it does not make speakers more likely to select pronouns (Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010; Kehler et al., 2008; Kehler & Rohde, 2013; Kehler & Rohde, 2019; Stevenson et al., 1994). Claims that predictability does not affect pronoun production are based on evidence that certain semantic roles are more likely to be re-mentioned in discourse, but speakers do not prefer pronouns for those event roles, especially when predictability stems from implicit causality estimates. These findings contrast with studies of transfer verbs, where goals are more predictable than sources, and speakers do use pronouns more for goals versus sources (Arnold, 2001; Rosa & Arnold, 2017). Our study takes a closer look at the predictability of implicit causes, using a novel experimental paradigm that is more contextualized than the methods used in previous studies. In two experiments, we find that implicit causality does affect pronominalization. This suggests that predictability may play a broad role in both reference production and language production more generally.
This study examined whether the longitudinal links between mothers' use of spanking and children's externalizing behaviors are moderated by family race/ethnicity, as would be predicted by cultural ...normativeness theory, once mean differences in frequency of use are controlled. A nationally representative sample of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American families (n = 11,044) was used to test a cross-lagged path model from 5 to 8 years old. While race/ethnic differences were observed in the frequency of spanking, no differences were found in the associations of spanking and externalizing over time: Early spanking predicted increases in children's externalizing while early child externalizing elicited more spanking over time across all race/ethnic groups.
The pronoun “they” can be either plural or singular, perhaps referring to an individual who identifies as nonbinary. How do listeners identify whether “they” has a singular or plural sense? We test ...the role of explicitly discussing pronouns (e.g., “Alex uses they/them pronouns”). In three experiments, participants read short stories, like “Alex went running with Liz. They fell down.” Answers to “Who fell down” indicated whether participants interpreted
they
as Alex or Alex-and-Liz. We found more singular responses in discourse contexts that make Alex more available: when Alex was either the only person in the context or mentioned first. Critically, the singular interpretation was stronger when participants heard explicit instructions that Alex uses
they/them
pronouns, even though participants in all conditions had ample opportunity to learn this fact through observation. Results show that the social trend to talk about pronouns has a direct impact on how language is understood.
Comprehenders have been shown to use both syntactic and semantic cues to understand pronouns like he and she. In Ana threw the ball to Liz. She…, there is a syntactic bias to assign “she” to the ...previous subject (Ana), and a semantic bias to assign it to the goal referent (Liz). How do people learn these biases? We tested how sensitivity to these cues is modulated by linguistic experience, measured with an Author Recognition Task (Stanovich & West, 1989). In two experiments, we found both the subject and goal biases overall, but higher print exposure only predicted use of the subject bias, not the goal bias. Our results suggest that the subject bias, and not the goal bias, may be learned from exposure.
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