Elsi Kaiser - linguistics, Finnish, pronouns, processing, demonstrative, anaphor, scrambling, psycholinguistics, eye tracking, reflexive

Psycholinguistics, especially adult sentence processing

Syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface(s)

Reference resolution (personal pronouns, demonstratives, reflexives, reciprocals)

Finnish linguistics

Click here for my CV.

Selected publications

Please email me (firstname dot lastname at usc dot edu) if you have trouble dowloading any of the papers.

Further downloadable publications are available at the USC Language Processing Lab website.

Journal articles

Kaiser, Elsi (In press). Focusing on pronouns: Consequences of subjecthood, pronominalization and contrastive focus. To appear in Language and Cognitive Processes. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi (In Press). Salience and contrast effects in reference resolution: The interpretation of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives. Language and Cognitive Processes. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi (2010). Investigating the Consequences of Focus on the Production and Comprehension of Referring Expressions. International Review of Pragmatics, 2(2), 266-297. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi (2010). Effects of contrast on referential form: Investigating the distinction between strong and weak pronouns. Discourse Processes, 47, 480-509. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi, Jeffrey T. Runner, Rachel S. Sussman & Michael K. Tanenhaus. (2009). Structural and semantic constraints on the resolution of pronouns and reflexives. Cognition, 112, 55-80. Download pdf from Cognition website Download pdf from NIH Public Access (free access)
Kaiser, Elsi and John C. Trueswell. (2008) Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(5), 709-748. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi (2006). Negation and the left periphery in Finnish. Lingua 116(3):314-350. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi and John C. Trueswell (2004) The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language. Cognition 94(2), 113-147. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi (2003). Referent Tracking and Pronoun Resolution in Finnish. WEB-SLS: The European Student Journal of Language and Speech. Download PDF

Selected book chapters

Kaiser, Elsi (2009). Effects of Anaphoric Dependencies and Semantic Representations on Pronoun Interpretation. In S.L. Devi, A. Branco and R. Mitkov (eds). Anaphora Processing and Applications (Selected papers from the 7th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium), pp.121-130. Heidelberg: Springer Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi & John C. Trueswell (2011). Investigating the interpretation of pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Going beyond salience. In E. Gibson & N. Pearlmutter (eds), The processing and acquisition of reference. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kaiser, Elsi & Virve-Anneli Vihman (2006). Invisible Arguments: Effects of Demotion in Estonian and Finnish. In T. Solstad & B. Lyngfelt (eds), Demoting the agent: passive and other voice-related phenomena. John Benjamins. Download pdf
Kaiser, Elsi (2006). Noncanonical negation and information structure in Finnish. In Valeria Molnár. and Susanne Winkler (eds.) The Architecture of Focus. Studies in Generative Grammar 82, 265-290. (Series Editors: Harry van der Hulst, Henk van Riemsdijk and Jan Koster). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kaiser, Elsi (2003). Encoding (Non)Locality in anaphoric relations. In Nelson, D. & Manninen, S. (eds.) Generative Approaches to Finnic and Saami Linguistics, 269-293. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Download pdf

Selected conference proceedings papers
- Kaiser, Elsi. (to appear). On the relation between coherence relations and anaphoric demonstratives in German. To appear in the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15. Saarland University Press: Saarbruecken, Germany. Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi, Jeffrey T. Runner, Rachel S. Sussman & Michael K. Tanenhaus (2008). The real-time interpretation of pronouns and reflexives: Structural and semantic information. In Emily Efner & Martin Walkow (eds), Proceedings of 37th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS), pp.73-85. GLSA, UMass. Abstract
- Kaiser, Elsi & Virve Vihman. (to appear). On the referential properties of Estonian pronouns and demonstratives. To appear in the Proceedings of the 22nd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (Aalborg University, June 2006). Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi, Jeffrey T. Runner, Rachel S. Sussman & Michael K. Tanenhaus (2006). What influences the referential properties of reflexives and pronouns in Finnish? In Christian Ebert & Cornelia Endriss (eds), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 10, ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 44, 155-169, Berlin. Abstract
- Kaiser, Elsi (2006). Effects of topic and focus on salience. In Christian Ebert & Cornelia Endriss (eds), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 10, ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 44, 139-154, Berlin.
- Kaiser, Elsi (in press). (Anti)logophoricity in Finnish. The Proceedings from the Main Session of the Chicago Linguistic Society's Fortieth Meeting. Volume 40-1. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Linguistic Society. (Presented April 2004)
- Kaiser, Elsi (2005). What the referential properties of the Estonian pronoun tema can tell us about the role of contrast in pronoun interpretation. Proceedings of the 28th Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 11(1):113-127. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Abstract
- Kaiser, Elsi & John Trueswell (2004). The referential properties of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives: Is salience enough? Cécile Meier, Matthias Weisgerber (ed.), Proceedings of the Conference sub8 Sinn und Bedeutung, 137-149. Arbeitspapier Nr. 177, FB Sprachwissenschaft. Konstanz, Germany: Universität Konstanz. Download paper from Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System
- Kaiser, Elsi & Katrin Hiietam (2004). A Typological Comparison of Third Person Pronouns in Finnish and Estonian. In A. Dahl, K. Bentzen & P. Svenonius (ed.), Nordlyd 31(4), Proceedings of the Workshop on Generative Approaches to Finnic Languages, 654-667.
- Kaiser, Elsi (2004). A Question of Case. In A. Dahl, K. Bentzen & P. Svenonius (ed.), Nordlyd 31(4), Proceedings of the Workshop on Generative Approaches to Finnic Languages, 694-707. Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi (2002) Case Alternations and NPIs in Questions in Finnish. WCCFL 21: Proceedings of the 21st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 194-207. Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press. Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi (2002) The syntax-pragmatics interface and Finnish ditransitive verbs. In M. van Koppen, E. Thrift, E. J. van der Torre and M. Zimmermann (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE IX). Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi (2000) Pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Indicators of Referent Salience. In P. Baker, A. Hardie, T. McEnery and A. Siewierska (eds.), Proceedings of the Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Conference. Lancaster, UK: University Center for Computer Corpus Research on Language, Technical Papers vol.12, 20-27. Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi (2000) The discourse functions and syntax of OSV word order in Finnish. In A. Okrent, and J. Boyle (eds.), The Proceedings from the Main Session of the Chicago Linguistic Society's Thirty-sixth Meeting, vol. 36.1, 179-194. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Linguistic Society. Download pdf
- Kaiser, Elsi (2000) A first look at the syntactic structure of Finnish ditransitive verbs. In J. Haugen & T. Louthain (eds), Proceedings of the Twelfth Student Conference in Linguistics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 38, 111-126. Download pdf
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