Cognitive biases in Nigerian Pidgin discourse continuations: Exploring the production of pronouns, coherence relations, and connectives ...

Pidgins tend to lack redundancy in their lexicon and syntax, which may result in decreased connective usage and other ways to manage information density. In this project, we study whether cognitive biases found to occur in other languages also occur in Nigerian Pidgin (both pronoun and relation biases), and whether Pidgin speakers mark their completions in a similar way. To study this, we employ a spoken continuation paradigm, whereby participants listen to a prompt, and verbally complete the prompt. This work is important for understanding the processes that affect discourse coherence in a pidgin-creole language and for developing cross-linguistically valid theories, given claims that the foundation for the IC phenomenon is similar across languages and cultures (Hartshorne et al., 2013). ...