Children’s processing of reflexives and pronouns in English: Evidence from eye-movements during listening

Pupillary responses reflect ambiguity resolution in pronoun processing

“…This prediction was supported by the results of the pupil dilation analysis, as this analysis demonstrated that the pronoun hem "him" elicits more pupil dilation than the reflexive zich "himself". Moreover, in line with Clackson et al (2011), the analyses of the responses and their RTs demonstrate that participants gave fewer target responses and were slower to respond to sentences with a pronoun, compared to sentences with a reflexive.…”

“…Importantly, these findings were obtained in a discourse context featuring two referents. As pronoun resolution is influenced by the presence of competitor antecedents (Badecker & Straub, 2002;Clackson et al, 2011), the number of referents in the discourse might modulate the resolution effort of pronouns.…”

“…Although they introduce potential ambiguity, listeners usually resolve pronouns correctly on the basis of available information. Several semantic and discourse factors have been found to influence pronoun resolution, including grammatical role parallelism (Branigan, Pickering, Liversedge, Stewart, & Urbach, 1995;Frazier, Taft, Roeper, Clifton, & Ehrlich, 1984;Smyth, 1994), gender information (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000;Badecker & Straub, 2002;Ehrlich, 1980), antecedent prominence, accessibility, and topicality (Arnold et al, 2000;Chafe, 1976;Cunnings, Patterson, & Felser, 2014;Givón, 1983;Järvikivi, Pyykkönen-Klauck, Schimke, Colonna, & Hemforth, 2014;Spenader, Smits, & Hendriks, 2009;Van Rij, Van Rijn, & Hendriks, 2013), and interference of prominent competitor antecedents (Badecker & Straub, 2002;Clackson, Felser, & Clahsen, 2011). In addition, syntactic constraints play a role (Hendriks & Spenader, 2006;Reinhart & Reuland, 1993).…”

“…For example, prominence of the antecedent in the discourse (Van Rij, 2012) and gender information (Arnold et al, 2000;Clackson et al, 2011) has been found to affect pronoun processing, while leaving the final interpretation unaffected. Pupil dilation measures are a way to investigate cognitive effort in cognitive processing non-invasively and online, although slightly delayed (e.g.…”

“…So, both subject and object pronouns can have multiple potential antecedents and are therefore more ambiguous than NPs and reflexives. When a pronoun has multiple potential antecedents, resolution is increasingly difficult and error prone (Ariel, 1990; see also Clackson et al, 2011). We expect that more cognitive effort is needed when processing a pronominal subject or object compared to a non-ambiguous subject NP or reflexive object (cf., e.g.…”