The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution

Sturt, Patrick

doi:10.1016/s0749-596x(02)00536-3

Cited by 287 publications

(526 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Similarly, the term "my son" must be taken as coreferential with other expressions in the passage, specifically "his son", "the son" (two occurrences), and "the boy". So, although we agree with Sturt (2003) that stereotype information may be lexically based, it cannot have the effects it has in our studies unless it is incorporated from lexical entries into representations of individuals in a mental model.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Evidence of immediate activation of gender information from a social role name

Reynolds

Garnham

Oakhill

2006

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Two experiments investigated whether the stereotypical gender of a character is encoded immediately into the discourse representation and influences later comprehension. In Experiment 1 people read, and were confused by, a short story in which an incongruity arises at the end if the gender of a character introduced by a social role name has been inferred. In Experiment 2 online measures confirmed that readers were slower to read the final clause of the passage. In addition, a follow-up verification question revealed that these readers did not immediately resolve the inconsistency by inferring the appropriate gender for the role term. These findings provide strong evidence for gender activation at the time that a role name is encoded. The implications of these results for the mental representation of gender information and for constraints on inference during text comprehension are discussed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Evidence of immediate activation of gender information from a social role name

Reynolds

Garnham

Oakhill

2006

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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“…To our knowledge, our results form the first observation in the language comprehension literature that grammatically unavailable nouns intrude on the resolution of referring expressions in grammatically correct sentences (for discussion, see Sturt, 2003;Phillips et al, 2010). This pattern seems related in spirit to instances of so-called "local coherence," where local constraints can sometimes outweigh global ones, producing "illusions" of grammaticality Tabor et al, 2004).…”

Section: Cue-based Retrieval and Cue-diagnosticity In Sentence Compresupporting

confidence: 59%

“…A similar phenomenon of attraction errors during subject-verb agreement production has been welldocumented in production (e.g., Bock and Miller, 1991;Staub, 2009) and in comprehension in certain cases (Pearlmutter et al, 1999;Wagers et al, 2009). Anaphor resolution has also shown vulnerability to interference that could be attributed to differences in cue-diagnosticity (Badecker and Straub, 2002;Sturt, 2003). Accordingly, the existence of cue-based attraction supports a processing account where the resonance between recent neural states or recent information and the cues at retrieval, as well as the resonance of those cues with the antecedent, comprise the probability of successful retrieval, and in turn, successful language comprehension.…”

Section: Cue-based Retrieval and Cue-diagnosticity In Sentence Comprementioning

confidence: 60%

“…Eguren and Sanchez (2004) and Eguren (2010) describe otra in this instance as a determiner 3 that allows nominal ellipsis. 4 This determiner has no grammatical gender of its own; it agrees with the gender of the elided noun as a result of the semantic entailment of this noun, and this gender morpheme information serves in resolving the dependency (Badecker and Straub, 2002;Sturt, 2003).…”

Section: Cue-based Retrieval Interference During Processing Of Ellipsismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension

2012

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Successful language use requires access to products of past processing within an evolving discourse. A central issue for any neurocognitive theory of language then concerns the role of memory variables during language processing. Under a cue-based retrieval account of language comprehension, linguistic dependency resolution (e.g., retrieving antecedents) is subject to interference from other information in the sentence, especially information that occurs between the words that form the dependency (e.g., between the antecedent and the retrieval site). Retrieval interference may then shape processing complexity as a function of the match of the information at retrieval with the antecedent versus other recent or similar items in memory. To address these issues, we studied the online processing of ellipsis in Castilian Spanish, a language with morphological gender agreement. We recorded event-related brain potentials while participants read sentences containing nounphrase ellipsis indicated by the determiner otro/a ('another'). These determiners had a grammatically correct or incorrect gender with respect to their antecedent nouns that occurred earlier in the sentence. Moreover, between each antecedent and determiner, another noun phrase occurred that was structurally unavailable as an antecedent and that matched or mismatched the gender of the antecedent (i.e., a local agreement attractor). In contrast to extant P600 results on agreement violation processing, and inconsistent with predictions from neurocognitive models of sentence processing, grammatically incorrect determiners evoked a sustained, broadly distributed negativity compared to correct ones between 400 and 1000 ms after word onset, possibly related to sustained negativities as observed for referential processing difficulties. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the attractor: an increased negativity was observed for grammatically correct determiners that did not match the gender of the attractor, suggesting that structurally unavailable noun phrases were at least temporarily considered for grammatically correct ellipsis. These results constitute the first ERP evidence for cue-based retrieval interference during comprehension of grammatical sentences.

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“…This is just what one would expect if referential dependencies are interpreted at the first opportunity (immediately, in these patterns). More recent work (e.g., Sturt 2003, Runner et al 2006 confirms the promptness with which the processor acts on referential dependencies.…”

Section: Processingmentioning

confidence: 83%