The time course of long-distance anaphor processing in Korean

Abstract

While early studies on the Korean long distance anaphor caki describe it to be subject-oriented in that it can only take subject antecedents, similarly to long distance anaphors in many other languages, more recent studies observe that it can take non-subject antecedents as well, especially in the context of certain verbs. This paper presents a visual-world eye-tracking study that tested whether the antecedent potential of caki in an embedded subject position is a function of the matrix subject, the matrix verb, or both, and whether the subject and the verb effects constrain the interpretation of caki in the same way as null pronouns, a commonly used pronominal form in Korean. These questions were addressed through an investigation of how the subject effect and the verb effect were manifested in processing these pronouns. We found that when caki, but not null pronouns, was first processed, there were more fixations to the images representing the matrix subject than the images representing the matrix object regardless of the matrix verb. We further found that the proportions of fixations to the images in both caki and null trials changed after the processing of some sentential verbs. These findings demonstrate that while null pronoun interpretation is a function of the verb effect only, caki-interpretation is a function of both the subject and the verb effect, supporting a multiple-constraints approach to anaphor resolution.

Multiple constraints modulate the processing of Chinese reflexives in discourse

“…However, the claim that syntactic information is privileged faces counterevidence from other studies suggesting that comprehenders show immediate sensitivity to non-syntactic cues, including, but not limited to, animacy, gender, and verb-based cues in antecedent retrieval (e.g. Badecker & Straub, 2002;Chen et al, 2012;Han et al, 2015;Jäger et al, 2015;Kaiser et al, 2009;Patil et al, 2016;Runner et al, 2006;Xu & Runner, 2019). These studies are more compatible with a Multiple Constraints Hypothesis, according to which both syntactic and non-syntactic constraints can guide the earliest moments of reference resolution.…”