Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: topic, contrastive focus and pronouns

Abstract

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor-antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent.

Information Structure Affects the Resolution of the Subject Pronouns Er and Der in Spoken German Discourse

“…Shortly a er pronoun onset (200 ms), participants fi xated more o en the pictures of the focused secondmentioned than the non-focused fi rst-mentioned character of the antecedent sentence regardless of the pronoun, as was indicated by the overall persisting main eff ect of order of mention. This is in line with previous research on pronoun resolution in English which found that the personal pronoun preferred focused entities compared to non-focused entities (Arnold, 1999, Experiment 1;Cowles et al, 2007). For example, Cowles et al who used a cross-modal priming task, found that the focus/non-focus antecedent distinction had a comparable infl uence on pronoun resolution as the topic/non-topic distinction (in that topicality and focus information increased the degree of salience of the antecedents).…”

“…While some studies found an infl uence of focus information on English pronoun resolution in that personal pronouns were preferred to refer to the entity in focus (Arnold, 1999, Experiment 1;Cowles et al, 2007), others did not fi nd this eff ect (Arnold, 1999, Experiment 2;Kaiser, 2011a;Colonna et al, 2012). This might be due to the fact that the studies used diff erent sentence materials.…”

“…The cupboard is heavier than the To keep the type of construction comparable across experiments, in Experiment 2 we used the same sentence materials, but presented them in a non-canonical structure [8b]. Note however that this is a diff erent focus construction than the cle -constructions used in previous experiments (Arnold, 1999;Cowles et al, 2007;Kaiser, 2011a;Colonna et al, 2012). In the comparative constructions, NP2 ( the cupboard ) constitutes the entity in focus as it is an answer to the wh -question "Which piece of furniture is heavier than the table?".…”

Enhancement and suppression effects resulting from information structuring in sentences

“…Recall that Cowles et al (2007)-in their comparison of different devices of emphasis-found that only when contrastive stress was given to a word within the scope of it-cleft focus was there any enhancement effect. In the present case, we established whether natural pitch-track changes were present in our stimuli.…”

“…More recently, Cowles, Walenski, and Kluender (2007) showed that both topicalizing an individual in a sentence or short text, and using cleft constructions to manipulate focus, reduced the time required to name the individual that was emphasized. Using auditory presentations, they found that it was necessary to put stress on the word within the scope of the it-cleft in order to obtain clear effects, suggesting that for spoken presentations, corresponding stress is important.…”