The effects of pronoun processing on information utilization during fixations in reading

Blanchard, Harry E.

doi:10.3758/bf03330319

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…However, that idea appears inconsistent with the broader literature, showing, for example, regressive eye-movements to the antecedent after reading a pronoun when verifying the consistency of a sentence with its preceding context (Carpenter & Just, 1977), and effects of distance to the antecedent on reading times (Ehrlich & Rayner, 1983; cf. Blanchard, 1987). It also seems to conflict with other evidence for rapid online pronoun processing described in the introduction (e.g., Arnold et al, 2000; Järvikivi et al, 2005; reviews in Garnham, 2001; Callahan, 2008; Nieuwland & Van Berkum, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution

Smith

Federmeier

2018

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Pronouns (e.g. 'it') are commonly studied in research on anaphoric reference, because they appear to carry out the linguistic function of referring back to an entity, while providing little or no new information about the referent. However, differing viewpoints have emerged in the psycholinguistic literature on what cognitive processes are engaged when reading or hearing a pronoun. One view is that encountering a pronoun leads the comprehender to reactivate the semantics of its antecedent. We examined this hypothesis by manipulating the concreteness of a noun antecedent and assessing whether an Event Related Potential (ERP) concreteness effect was elicited at a downstream pronoun. We observed a robust concreteness effect at the noun, but no evidence of a concreteness effect at the pronoun. In a secondary analysis, we examined whether N400 semantic priming from the antecedent would increase on content words shortly following the pronoun, relative to those preceding it. Again, although we observed robust semantic priming from the noun antecedent at positions following it, we did not observe an increase in the size of this effect following the pronoun. Taken together with the broader literature, our data suggest that pronouns do not induce the activation of (much) new semantic information in long-term memory, perhaps instead triggering an attentional shift towards their antecedents' active semantic representations within working memory. This, in turn, suggests that the process of linking an anaphor to its antecedent is attentionally mediated and does not entail long-term memory access, in contrast with ACT-R inspired models (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution

Smith

Federmeier

2018

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…When constructing the sentence stimuli, we had to consider the role that the distance between a context-dependent item (pronoun, PRO, or trace) and its antecedent can play in regards to storage and computational demands. Previous studies have shown that the shorter the distance, the more readily available the antecedent is in working memory (Garrod & Sanford, 1977;Clark & Sengul, 1979;Ehrlich, 1980;Ehrlich & Rayner, 1983;Blanchard, 1987). For example, evidence has been found that object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives (e.g.…”

Section: Experimental Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Control in a Norwegian grammar maze

Larsen

Johansson²

2022

Nord J Linguist

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Coreference processing of Control constructions and their pronoun-containing counterparts can be studied experimentally using priming or interference paradigms. We replicate findings in a priming study on non-finite Control constructions in Norwegian (Larsen & Johansson, 2020) and contrast them with their finite counterparts using interference effects in a grammatical maze (G-maze) design. We asked participants to read sentences word-by-word and to select the grammatically correct continuation from two options. When the ungrammatical option was a potential antecedent from within the sentence, we predicted interference, i.e., longer reaction times compared to an unrelated baseline. We observed a trend towards significant interference effects when a participant was presented with either of the potential noun phrase (NP) antecedents of PRO in competition with the infinitive marker (test position zero) during the processing of a Control sentence. This indicates reactivation of potential antecedents at the infinitive marker, and a reactivation position (PRO) near or at the infinitive marker. We also observed significant differences between Control constructions and their pronoun counterparts. A significant interference effect was recorded for Subject Pronoun constructions when either potential NP antecedent of the pronoun was presented in competition with the pronoun itself. A similar trend was recorded for Object Pronoun sentences.

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“…1-33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1133 (Ehrlich & Rayner 1983;Blanchard 1987;Arnold et al 2000;Stewart, Pickering & Sanford 2000;Kehler & Rohde 2013). Given the potential complexity of this task and the difficulties of measuring it experimentally, our initial questions only concern timing: How long does it take to resolve reference?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing adjunct control: Evidence on the use of structural information and prediction in reference resolution

Green

McCourt

Lau

et al. 2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual-world eyetracking, we compare the timecourse of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression.

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The effects of pronoun processing on information utilization during fixations in reading

Cited by 8 publications

References 4 publications

What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution

What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution

Control in a Norwegian grammar maze

Processing adjunct control: Evidence on the use of structural information and prediction in reference resolution

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