Processing anaphoric constructions: Insights from electrophysiological studies

Callahan, Sarah M.

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2007.10.002

Cited by 29 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…gender and number) and resolution in which contextual information and real-world knowledge are integrated to help identify the referent (Callanhan 2008). The absence of the mismatch effect in the current study may be interpreted as a failure to check the agreement of the gender feature at the first stage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Exploring the Cause of English Pronoun Gender Errors by Chinese Learners of English: Evidence from the Self-paced Reading Paradigm

Dong

Wen

Zeng

et al. 2014

J Psycholinguist Res

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To locate the underlying cause of biological gender errors of oral English pronouns by proficient Chinese-English learners, two self-paced reading experiments were conducted to explore whether the reading time for each 'he' or 'she' that matched its antecedent was shorter than that in the corresponding mismatch situation, as with native speakers of English. The critical manipulation was to see whether highlighting the gender information of an antecedent with a human picture would make a difference. The results indicate that such manipulation did make a difference. Since oral Chinese does not distinguish 'he' and 'she', the findings suggest that Chinese speakers probably do not usually process biological gender for linguistic purposes and the mixed use of 'he' and 'she' is probably a result of deficient processing of gender information in the conceptualizer. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Exploring the Cause of English Pronoun Gender Errors by Chinese Learners of English: Evidence from the Self-paced Reading Paradigm

Dong

Wen

Zeng

et al. 2014

J Psycholinguist Res

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“…According to a psycholinguistic model of anaphora resolution, pronoun resolution can be differentiated into a bonding stage and a resolution stage (Garrod & Sanford, ; Garrod & Terras, ), and these two processing steps can be linked to specific language‐related ERP components (Callahan, ). The bonding stage is related to several negative manifestations such as LAN (left anterior negativity), Nref (sustained anterior negativity), or N400 (Qiu, Swaab, Chen, & Wang, ; X. D. Xu, Jiang, & Zhou, ), reflecting the difficulty of retrieving an anaphor with the antecedent entities.…”

Section: A Neurocognitive Model Of Anaphora Resolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to the psycholinguistic model of anaphora resolution, different stages of pronoun resolution are associated with different ERP effects (Callahan, ; Silva‐Pereyra et al, ). Given that the resolution stage is consistently manifested by a late positivity effect (P600 effect) and that a similar positivity effect has also been repeatedly observed in sentences with topic shift (Hirotani & Schumacher, ; Hung & Schumacher, ; X. Yang et al, ), we predicted such an effect for topic‐shift sentences (T+C−, 8b) compared with the topic‐continued sentences (T+C+, 8a) or the subject‐shift sentences (T−C−, 9b) during pronoun resolution.…”

Section: A Neurocognitive Model Of Anaphora Resolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to the psycholinguistic model of anaphora resolution, different stages of pronoun resolution are associated with different ERP effects (Callahan, 2008;Silva-Pereyra et al, 2012). Given that the resolution stage is consistently manifested by a late positivity effect (P600 effect) and that a similar positivity effect has also been repeatedly observed in sentences with topic shift (Hirotani & Schumacher, 2011;X.…”

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Topic shift impairs pronoun resolution during sentence comprehension: Evidence from event‐related potentials

Zhou

2015

Psychophysiology

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This study investigated how topic shift and topic continuation influence pronoun interpretation in Chinese. ERPs recorded on pronouns in topic structure showed stronger and earlier late positive responses (P600) for the topic-shift than for the topic-continuation conditions. However, in nontopic structure where the subject (denoting only subjecthood), rather than the topic (denoting both topichood and subjecthood), acted as the antecedent of the pronoun, almost indistinguishable P600 responses were obtained on the pronoun regardless of whether it was referring to the subject (i.e., subject continuation) or the object (i.e., subject shift). Moreover, stronger and earlier P600 responses were elicited by pronouns in the topic-shift than in the subject-shift conditions, although there was no difference between the topic-continuation and the subject-continuation conditions. These findings suggest that topic shift results in greater difficulty in the resolution stage of referential processing, although the bonding process is not sensitive to the manipulation of topic status, and that topic has a privileged cognitive status relative to other nontopic entities (e.g., subject) in real-time language processing.

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“…When the features (e.g., case, gender, number) of the pronoun are incompatible with the only possible antecedent, a P600 is elicited. This is a broadly distributed positivity between 400 and 1,000 ms, with a central parietal or parietal maximum at approximately 500-800 ms after stimulus onset (Hammer et al, 2005;Harris, Wexler, & Holcomb, 2000;Lamers, Jansma, Hammer, & Münte, 2006, 2008Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006;Osterhout, Bersick, & McLaughlin, 1997;Osterhout & Mobley, 1995;Schmitt et al, 2002). The P600 is elicited by a wide variety of linguistic contexts including, but not necessarily limited to, those involving syntactic violations or increased syntactic complexity (see Osterhout, Kim, & Kuperberg, 2007, for review).…”

Section: Event-related Potentialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An ERP study of coreference in Spanish: Semantic and grammatical gender cues

2012

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We report two event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments aimed to investigate the roles played by semantic and syntactic information during pronoun resolution. The first experiment was designed to show that ambiguity of the pronoun (e.g., word class ambiguity) makes an important contribution to the pattern observed in previous ERP studies. As expected, the results showed a different ERP pattern for ambiguous and nonambiguous pronouns. The second experiment analyzed pronoun resolution when gender agreement and animacy were manipulated, using only unambiguous pronouns. Results showed P600 effects at 500 to 700 ms and at 700 to 900 ms. Amplitude of the second window was significantly greater for animate than for inanimate antecedents. The modulation of the agreement effect by animacy suggests that repair processes after grammatical disagreement detection are influenced by semantics.

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Processing anaphoric constructions: Insights from electrophysiological studies

Cited by 29 publications

References 81 publications

Exploring the Cause of English Pronoun Gender Errors by Chinese Learners of English: Evidence from the Self-paced Reading Paradigm

Exploring the Cause of English Pronoun Gender Errors by Chinese Learners of English: Evidence from the Self-paced Reading Paradigm

Topic shift impairs pronoun resolution during sentence comprehension: Evidence from event‐related potentials

An ERP study of coreference in Spanish: Semantic and grammatical gender cues

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