Structural and semantic constraints on the resolution of pronouns and reflexives

Abstract

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives and how different kinds of information are integrated during real-time reference resolution. The results show that the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture NP constructions is sensitive not only to purely structural information, as is commonly assumed in syntactically-oriented theories of anaphor resolution, but also to semantic information (see Kuno, 1987;Tenny, 2003). Moreover, the results show that pronouns and reflexives differ in the degree of sensitivity they exhibit to different kinds of information. This finding indicates that the form-specific multiple-constraints approach (see Kaiser, 2003;Kaiser, 2005;Kaiser & Trueswell, 2008;Brown-Schmidt, Byron & Tanenhaus, 2005), which states that referential forms can exhibit asymmetrical sensitivities to the different constraints guiding reference resolution, also applies in the within-sentence domain.

On the mental representations originating during the interaction between language and vision

“…Visual context has been shown to affect eye movements during anticipation in linguistic processing (Kamide et al 2003), ambiguity resolution (Chambers et al 2002;Spivey et al 2002), structural priming (Arai et al 2007), and reference resolution (Kaiser et al 2009). The powerful effect of visual context on linguistic interpretation prompts ''affordances'' of objects or the ''mental world'' that viewers create while processing sentences and scenes (Chambers et al 2004).…”

The interaction of visual and linguistic saliency during syntactic ambiguity resolution

“…2 Saliency affects the prominence of a referent in a given linguistic (Ariel, 1990) or visual context (Fukumura, van Gompel, & Pickering, 2010). A referent that is more salient (prominent) is more easily accessible in the subsequent discourse, although for some cases the saliency of a referent might depend on its form (see Kaiser, Runner, Sussman, & Tanenhaus, 2009). In the present study, we approach linguistic saliency from a more perceptual perspective and focus on prosodic prominence; in particular, we are interested in the effect of intonational breaks, i.e., the pauses separating constituents.…”

Individual Differences in Subphonemic Sensitivity and Phonological Skills

“…The VWP has proved fruitful in measuring the fine-grained nature of online speech 155 processing at various linguistic levels, including discourse/pragmatic (Altmann & Kamide, 2009;156 Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006;Magnuson, Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2008), syntactic 157 (Chambers, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2004;Tanenhaus et al, 1995), semantic (Huettig & 158 Altmann, 2005;Kaiser, Runner, Sussman, & Tanenhaus, 2009), lexical (Magnuson, Dixon, 159 Tanenhaus, & Aslin, 2007), phonemic (Allopenna et al, 1998;Desroches, Joanisse, & 160 Robertson, 2006;Magnuson, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Dahan, 2003) and, most importantly for the 161 purposes of our study, at subphonemic levels (Dahan, Magnuson, Tanenhaus, & Hogan, 2001;162 McMurray, Aslin, Tanenhaus, Spivey, & Subik, 2008). While general speech perception and 163 comprehension (as assessed by standardized instruments) do not seem to be severely affected in 164 RD and related phonological deficits (Giraud & Poeppel, 2012;Serniclaes et al, 2004), the VWP 165 has the potential to reveal subtle differences in sensitivity to even subphonemic coarticulatory 166 details in speech (Dahan et al, 2001).…”