To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs) provide an alternative account of how purely linguistic information could drive apparent world knowledge effects. We addressed these confounds in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we found a strong effect of world knowledge plausibility (measured using a norming study) on responses to comprehension questions that probed pronoun interpretation. In experiment 2, participants were slower to read continuations that contradicted world knowledge-consistent interpretations of a pronoun, implying that comprehenders deploy world knowledge spontaneously. Both effects persisted when controlling for the predictions of GPT-3, an LLM, suggesting that pronoun interpretation is at least partly driven by knowledge about the world and not the word. We propose two potential mechanisms by which knowledge-driven pronoun resolution occurs, based on validation- and expectation-driven discourse processes. The results suggest that while distributional information may capture some aspects of world knowledge, human comprehenders likely draw on other sources unavailable to LLMs.

中文翻译：

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单词知识是否解释了世界知识对代词解释的影响？

统计语言知识在多大程度上可以解释世界知识对语言理解的影响？我们通过关注语言理解的核心方面来解决这个问题：代词解析。虽然现有研究表明理解者使用世界知识来解析代词，但分布假设及其在大语言模型（LLM）中的操作化提供了另一种解释，说明纯粹的语言信息如何驱动明显的世界知识效应。我们通过两个实验解决了这些混淆问题。在实验 1 中，我们发现世界知识合理性（使用规范研究测量）对探讨代词解释的理解问题的反应有很强的影响。在实验 2 中，参与者阅读与代词的世界知识一致解释相矛盾的延续的速度较慢，这意味着理解者会自发地运用世界知识。当控制了法学硕士 GPT-3 的预测时，这两种效应仍然存在，这表明代词解释至少部分是由有关世界的知识而不是单词驱动的。我们基于验证和期望驱动的话语过程，提出了知识驱动代词解析发生的两种潜在机制。结果表明，虽然分布式信息可能捕获世界知识的某些方面，但人类理解者可能会利用法学硕士无法获得的其他来源。