Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade‐off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning “He/She/It runs”) as referring to the most prominent referent in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, “He runs”) as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian‐speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded‐rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research.

中文翻译：

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儿童如何处理简化形式：话语中代词处理的计算认知建模方法

与更详细的描述（如酷玩乐队的主唱）相比，诸如代词he 之类的简化形式很少提供有关其预期含义的信息。因此，听众必须使用上下文信息来恢复他们的意思。在各种语言中，形式的信息性与其所指对象的突出性之间似乎存在权衡。例如，意大利的成人患者一般解释信息地空空代词在句子科尔（意为“他/她/它运行”）作为参照话语最突出的指称，并提供更多的信息公开代词（如，吕中吕CORRE，“他跑”）指代不太突出的所指对象。尽管众所周知，学习意大利语的儿童在解释代词时会遇到困难，但尚不清楚他们是如何获得这种空主代词和明显主语代词之间的语用分工的，以及这与他们认知能力的发展有何关系。在这里，我们表明认知发展可以解释讲意大利语的儿童和成人所表现出的一般解释模式。在建模有限理性行为的框架中使用实验研究和计算模拟，我们认为无效代词解释受工作记忆容量的影响，因此似乎取决于话语上下文，而公开代词解释受处理速度的影响，这表明听众必须说话人选择的原因。我们的研究结果表明，认知能力可能会以各种方式限制语言形式及其含义的获得。计算模拟产生的新预测指出了未来研究的几个方向。