Pronouns Reactivate Conceptual Representations.

Or so say D. E. Dijksterhuis, M. W. Self, J. K. Possel, et al., in their “Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal neurons” (Science 385.6716 [26 Sep 2024]:1478-1484; DOI: 10.1126/science.adr2813). I don’t have access to the full article, but here’s the Editor’s summary:

Languages use pronouns to refer to nouns or concepts that were introduced earlier in a conversation. Do these pronouns activate the same neuronal representations in the brain as the previously introduced words? Using human intracranial recordings, Dijksterhuis et al. found that during reading, single cells in the medial temporal lobes that respond selectively to specific individuals also respond to pronouns that later in sentences refer to previously read nouns. These results indicate how memory and language are linked at the single-cell level. —Peter Stern

The abstract is available at the link. Interesting, if true!

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    Goodness! The brain is involved in thought!

    I can’t read the paper either, but “specific individuals” suggests some confusion about grammar on the part of the writers, or perhaps on the part of the editor.

    Specifically, that they suppose pronoun anaphora is basically the same process as referring to the proper name of a person. Judging (possibly wrongly) by the exact words of the summary, all that they have shown (if they have shown it) is that a pronoun referring to a specific person known to the reader “activates” the same part of the brain as the person’s name.

    This would only say something about actual grammar if, when reading

    “A cat sat on the mat. It was purple.”

    your electric phrenology (or whatever: here they seem to be actually sticking things into people’s brains) zoomed in on the same area for “cat” and “it.” (Or, what would be really interesting, the same area as “mat”, and subsequent enquiry showed that that was how the reader had interpreted the sentence.)

    Possibly they did something just like that, and the summary is just careless.

    But if not, they have not demonstrated anything about language at all: only that certain specific bits of your brain light up (apparently) when thinking of a particular person. (Quite romantic, really …)

  2. Preprint.

    Quotable: “Shrek and Courtney Love walked into a bar. He/She sat at a table.”

  3. Stu Clayton says

    “A cat sat on the mat. It was purple.”

    “A cat shat on the mat. It was purple” is for me much less ambiguous. Here the color is attributed to the catshit.

  4. Thanks, Y.

    EDIT: Apparently this is about pictures of celebrities, so it applies only to proper nouns (so far).

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    @Stu:

    Truly, pronoun reference is a complex matter.

    @Y:

    Thanks!

    They seem to have done exactly what I suspected. They are not actually investigating language at all, much less grammar. At most, perhaps, “mentalese.”

    The references are all to neurobiology or computational linguistics. Nothing on syntax (though, to be fair, their methodology makes all that irrelevant anyway.)

  6. They are not actually investigating language at all

    Oh hell. Not that I’m surprised in the least.

  7. I think so. But studying what and where happens in your brain as you’re processign speech still contributes into understading of speech even if the specific part chosen for study has more to do with referent concepts/the signified.
    You’ll need this information.

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    True; I suppose that it is a “linguistic” point (on some level) that a third-person pronoun used anaphorically may summon up the same activity in the brain as its antecedent did shortly before.

    I don’t think many linguists would take this as a epoch-making discovery, however.

    I think the authors (who seem to be innocent of any specialist syntactic knowledge) are presenting their technique as a sort of proof of concept, that might lead to actual fruitful discoveries. But I think they’ve fallen prey to a confusion of levels: words refer (in some way) to the real world, but what their method is investigating is the physical correlates in the brain of thinking about the referents, not the words themselves. I don’t think this approach can even in principle shed any light on the $64,000 question of just how language can refer to the extralinguistic world.*

    (Of course, in a world in which many apparently sensible people suppose that APEs/LLMs are “intelligent”, despite having no actual means of referring to the physical world except via plagiarism, many people are somewhat confused on these points.)

    * Apart from anything else, this is a complete non-starter if you try to divorce language from its social and cultural context. (The latest Hiphilangsci podcast makes an interesting, if not altogether convincing, case that Chomsky was driven to separate language from social interaction as he does by his bad conscience about his linguistic work being funded by the military.)

  9. You saw noone? And at that distance. You must have excitable neurons.

  10. Languages use pronouns to refer to nouns or concepts that were introduced earlier in a conversation. Do these pronouns activate the same neuronal representations in the brain as the previously introduced words? Using human intracranial recordings, Dijksterhuis et al. found that during reading, single cells in the medial temporal lobes that respond selectively to specific individuals also respond to pronouns that later in sentences refer to previously read nouns. These results indicate how memory and language are linked at the single-cell level.

    I really don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know how you could find this remarkable as a “language person” unless you met someone whose mind doesn’t operate this way. I have. My wife. As a result of going through a very poor educational system (the nation switched from teaching Russian to teaching English half way through high school, but her school kept on the Russian teacher to teach English) and a pricey conversation school that hired foreigners to teach English, whose guiding philosophy was “It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong, as long as you SPEAK in English”, she never learnt the difference between “he” and “she”. (Mongolian doesn’t actually have personal pronouns — they are simply demonstratives repurposed, and they do not distinguish between genders.) She uses “he” and “she”, “him” and “her”, “his” and “her” interchangeably, at random. As a result, although there has been considerable improvement, our son is still sometimes referred to as “she”.

    While the latest trend is to roundly declaim the use of gendered pronouns as discriminating against people who don’t want to identify with their birth gender, the fact is that the use of gendered pronouns is absolutely essential to following any kind of conversation in English. To give you an example, my wife was telling me about a well-known Mongolian married couple who are constantly feuding on social media. Both were previously married to other people. During this description she mentioned that “He’s always criticising her husband”. I had to ruminate on this a while. The only reasonable interpretation I could come up with is that her husband was always criticising her previous husband. But of course, there was a more mundane explanation. The intended meaning was “She’s always criticising her husband”.

    Incidentally, Latin grammar distinguished between relativus (any kind of pronoun that referred to an antecedent, including personal pronouns) and demonstrativus, which referred to referents in the extralingual context. How relativus came to be used for “relative clauses” and “relative pronouns” is a tortuous tale.

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    The English spoken by my Kusaasi colleagues in Bawku similarly often had “he” and “she” (and so on) in free variation. None of the local languages make a distinction of sex in pronouns (not even the local Hausa) and even very competent L2 English speakers did this.

    I used to get much more thrown by “she” for males than by “he” for females, which doubtless says something about my own patriarchal conditioning.

    The whole question of pronoun reference is much more complicated than the authors of this paper realise, I think; though, as I say, their technique does not actually shed any light on this anyway: the outcomes would be the same regardless of how the language used actually manages this. All that is necessary is that the pronoun does refer to some antecedent in some way.

    In Kusaal, if you put a personal pronoun subject after ka “and” when it does not start a new sentence, it has to refer to something other than the subject of the preceding clause. This rule even overrides the distinction that third person pronouns do make, between human and non-human (which is tending to break down anyway):

    Pu’a la da’ daka ka keŋ Bɔk.
    woman the buy box and go Bawku
    ‘The woman has bought a box and gone to Bawku.’

    Pu’a la da’ daka ka o keŋ Bɔk.
    woman the buy box and he/she go Bawku
    ‘The woman has bought a box and it has gone to Bawku.’

  12. I still have a hard time with m/f gendered languages, because of interference from Hebrew. I always need to be attentive and not call a Spanish house él or the wind ella. Some nouns are harder, probably because they are less practiced.

  13. David Eddyshaw says

    “House” and “wind” are both masculine (and referred to with ef.)

    [Actually, Semitic “house” is weird anyway: ends in -t, refers to a place, and still it’s masculine. But then, the entire purpose of the Semitic languages is to prove the existence of God by being humanly impossible.]

  14. a former boss of mine (KMT-taiwanese family/upbringing*, putongua-primary) tends to use generic “she” in english, if she isn’t concentrating on her english. i know my own use of yiddish noun-classes is semi-random, because english only has one for non-humans.

    .
    * with some lasting commitment, though she works pretty actively on both sides of the strait as well as in the u.s.; i recall her going to soong mei-ling (“madame chiang kai-shek”)’s funeral shortly after i started working for her.

  15. that’s interesting.

    I wonder if she (a) continues in English some strategy explicitly present in her L1 (a) same but implicitly rather than explicitly or (c) does not really reproduce any strategy from her L1, but naturality of this she for her is conditioned culturally.

    regarding (a), I thought that he and she sound same in Mandarin and that in writing several more variants are distinguished (man, woman, animal, thing, deity) and “he” can be generic. Nothing to provoke this she.
    But I don’t know Mandarin.

  16. DE, not very different from English:

    Judith talked to Mary and she went to Paris.

    I used to get much more thrown by “she” for males than by “he” for females

    The cultural issue with she-man does not need introduction, but I wonder if [the English, Russian] langauge itself anyhow contributes into neutrality of he-women.

  17. I always need to be attentive and not call a Spanish house él or the wind ella. Some nouns are harder, probably because they are less practiced.
    Something similar happens to me even with everyday words in Russian – when I’m not speaking carefully, I tend to use female ona for “butter” and “milk”, even though they are neuter in Russian, because they are female in German.

  18. @Bathrobe the fact is that the use of gendered pronouns is absolutely essential to following any kind of conversation in English. [I see the convo has moved on, but I can’t let this pass.]

    You need to get out a bit more. I’m currently travelling in Taiwan. Putonghua also doesn’t have gendered pronouns. My travelling companion has an enormous family I still haven’t figured out all the relationships of; a substantial proportion of the female members have pet-name ‘Mei mei’; notwithstanding I’m treated to vast feasts on a daily basis. And most small-talk involves a blizzard of English pronouns of random gender, as you describe. No guarantee that a ‘him’ in one sentence won’t turn into a ‘her’ in the next.

    Just roll with it. It’ll sort itself out.

  19. David Eddyshaw says

    Classical Ethiopic has the Semitic m/f system, but it is consistently applied only with human-reference nouns. With other nouns, the gender fluctuates even within a single text, and apparently sometimes just reflects the gender of the original Greek noun.

  20. @AntC

    I said “in English”. Other languages are different. I was, if you will remember, discussing it in the context of Mongolian.

    A unrelated example. Japanese and Chinese both rely heavily on “topicalisation”. Not all languages do. Mongolian, for instance, doesn’t. Get your languages straight.

  21. Yes I grokked that. I too was referring to conversation in English — or at least Chinglish. I process all pronouns as if ‘the(y/m)’, and scan the context as for other ambiguities.

    That approach is already needed in other Englishes wrt “people who don’t want to identify …” as you put it above. There’s a youtuber I follow who strictly uses ‘they/m’ even when referring to historical people, even when they’ve just quoted some document using gendered pronouns.

  22. Stu Clayton says

    There’s a youtuber I follow who strictly uses ‘they/m’ even when referring to historical people, even when they’ve just quoted some document using gendered pronouns.

    Any day now, “I” and “you” will incur the wrath of the pronoun rectifiers. “Identity” starts there, after all. Even “we” is parlous – is it an all-inclusive LGBT “we” or an exclusive cis-we ?

    I often wonder – since nobody on the internet knows you’re a dog, why not leave it that way ? Why do so many people want a medal, and 60 minutes of prime-time tv, for their idiosyncrasies ?

  23. PlasticPaddy says

    I have for some time suspected that Sparky was occasionally commenting as Stu Clayton…

  24. Stu Clayton says

    Sparky is my sockpuppet, and I his ! Wheels within wheels.

  25. Stu Clayton says

    Huh. Ezekiel 1:16. Computer graphics are needed for this. Ol’ Zeke had an inkling of quantum entanglement.

    The chapter ends with a face-plant, which is pretty downbeat. “And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake”. Clearly there’s going to be a sequel.

  26. Ezekiel 2: The Enscrollening.

  27. Stu Clayton says

    Is it already out ?? Biblegateway didn’t provide a link.

  28. David Eddyshaw says
  29. David Eddyshaw says

    The chapter ends with a face-plant

    As someone pointed out here, whenever angels appear in the Bible, they say “Be not afraid.” It never works.

  30. Stu Clayton says

    “The Devil wears a number 11 shoe” ?!

    Oh. Satan Shoes

  31. Stu Clayton says

    As someone pointed out here, whenever angels appear in the Bible, they say “Be not afraid.” It never works.

    That was originally out-of-universe, then quoted by DM here.

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