Age-Related Changes in Implicit Causality and Consequentiality Pronoun Biases

Abstract

When adults encounter pronouns in sentences like “Sally frightened Mary because she…,” they typically resolve the pronoun to the inferred cause of the event, a phenomenon called implicit causality. Similarly, in sentences like “Because Sally frightened Mary, she…,” pronoun interpretation often reflects the inferred consequence of the event, known as implicit consequentiality. We re-analysed data from two publicly available cross-sectional studies (Hartshorne & Snedeker, 2013, Are implicit causality pronoun resolution biases consistent across languages and cultures? Experimental Psychology , 60 , 179; Hartshorne et al., 2015, Development of the first-mention bias. Journal of Child Language , 42 , 423) to explore age-related changes in implicit causality and implicit consequentiality pronoun biases. Dataset 1 included 978 native English speakers aged 9–81 years and Dataset 2 included 2,648 native English speakers aged 8–81 years. Both implicit causality and consequentiality showed significant developmental improvements from childhood into early adulthood, with implicit causality effects continuing to mature longer, suggesting that the underlying representations supporting pronoun biases continue developing into adulthood. There was no observable decline in pronoun bias, though results after 65 were highly variable.