Immediate sensitivity to structural constraints in pronoun resolution

On the scope of presupposition in discourse reading comprehension

referential relationships can be communicated through presupposition. The presupposition trigger (also) in Jiayan also bought eggs exerts a pragmatic constraint that besides the object, the verb constrains additional and alternative referents. Our study provided a novel set of evidence that the reader preferred larger- over smaller-sized sets for the scope of presupposition in discourse comprehension. The structural hierarchy in smaller-sized sets and the earlier-mentioned structural details in larger-sized sets drove higher preference. Furthermore, readers' difference in their preference reflected their tendency to attend to discourse structural information. These findings are consistent with the multiple constraints hypothesis/the presupposition maximization principle hypothesis, rather than the local bias hypothesis. The present study enlightened the understanding of structural constraints on processing the number and the identity of presupposed referential information in discourse reading comprehension.

Chinese EFL learners different from English natives in cataphora resolution: Evidence from eye-tracking studies

Previous studies on English natives have shown that encountering an English cataphoric pronoun triggers an active search for its antecedent and this searching process is modulated by syntactic constraints. It remains unknown whether the conclusion is universal to EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, particularly those with distinct L1 like Chinese in linguistic typology. Therefore, this study used two eye-tracking experiments to investigate how Chinese EFL learners resolve English cataphora. The experiments adopted the gender-mismatch paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated whether Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency would adopt the similar processing pattern to English natives and found that gender congruency elicited longer reading times than gender incongruency between the first potential antecedent and the cataphoric pronoun, the effect early observed in high-proficiency relative to low-proficiency learners. Experiment 2 explored whether the cataphora resolution process was modulated by Binding Principle B and revealed that longer first fixation durations and first pass reading times were observed in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions no matter the antecedents are binding-accessible or not while longer regression path durations occurred in gender-mismatch than in gender-match conditions only as the antecedents are binding-accessible. Taken together, these results indicate that Chinese EFL learners also adopt an active search mechanism to resolve cataphoric pronouns, yet along a processing path distinct from English natives'. Specifically, Chinese EFL learners predictively link a cataphoric pronoun to the first potential antecedent in the sentence but only a gender-matching antecedent can prompt them to engage in deep processing of the antecedent. Moreover, the processing time varies with the learners' English proficiency. Furthermore, unlike native English speakers' early application of syntactic constraints in their cataphora resolution, Chinese EFL learners try to establish co-reference relations between cataphoric pronouns and antecedents regardless of following or flouting Binding Principle B in early processing stages whereas they exclusively link the cataphoric pronouns to the binding-accessible antecedents in late processing stages. This study adds evidence to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis whereby L2 learners resort to lexical prior to syntactic cues to process sentences in general, which is just opposite to the fashion adopted by the natives.

Pronouns Are as Sensitive to Structural Constraints as Reflexives in Early Processing: Evidence From Visual World Paradigm Eye-Tracking

A number of studies in the extant literature report findings that suggest asymmetry in the way reflexive and pronoun anaphors are interpreted in the early stages of processing: that pronouns are less sensitive to structural constraints, as formulated by Binding Theory, than reflexives, in the initial antecedent retrieval process. However, in previous visual world paradigm eye-tracking studies, these conclusions were based on sentences that placed the critical anaphors within picture noun phrases or prepositional phrases, which have independently been shown not to neatly conform to the Binding Theory principles. We present results from a visual world paradigm eye-tracking experiment that show that when critical anaphors are placed in the indirect object position immediately following a verb as a recipient argument, pronoun and reflexive processing are equally sensitive to structural constraints.

Electrophysiological differences in older and younger adults' anaphoric but not cataphoric pronoun processing in the absence of age-related behavioural slowdown

This study reports on an event-related potentials experiment to uncover whether per-millisecond electrophysiological brain activity and analogous behavioural responses are age-sensitive when comprehending anaphoric (referent-first) and cataphoric (pronoun-first) pronouns. Two groups of French speakers were recruited (young n = 18; aged 19-35 and older adults n = 15; aged 57-88) to read sentences where the anaphoric/cataphoric pronouns and their potential referents either matched or mismatched in gender. Our findings indicate that (1) the older adults were not less accurate or slower in their behavioural responses to the mismatches than the younger adults, (2) both anaphoric and cataphoric conditions evoked a central/parietally distributed P600 component with similar timing and amplitude in both the groups. Importantly, mean amplitudes of the P600 effect were modulated by verbal short-term memory span in the older adults but not in the younger adults, (3) nevertheless, the older but not the younger adults displayed an additional anterior negativity emerging on the frontal regions in response to the anaphoric mismatches. These results suggest that pronoun processing is resilient in healthy ageing individuals, but that functional recruitment of additional brain regions, evidenced with the anterior negativity, compensates for increased processing demands in the older adults' anaphora processing.

Prominence-sensitive pronoun resolution: New evidence from the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure

Past studies have shown that antecedent prominence affects the processing of a pronoun, but these studies have used experimental methodologies that do not make it possible to determine at what stage(s) of pronominal resolution these effects occur. We used the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure to investigate whether antecedent prominence affects the accuracy of antecedent retrieval, the speed of resolution, or both. Consistent with previous results, we find that accuracy is higher when antecedents are prominent than when they are not (cf. Foraker & McElree, 2007). However, in contrast to previous results, we also find that prominence impacts the speed with which the pronominal dependency is resolved. We consider the implications of our findings for various models of pronoun resolution and offer suggestions for how to implement prominence-sensitive speed differences within a cue-based retrieval architecture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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

Pronouns serve a critical referential function, yet the cognitive processes engaged during pronoun comprehension remain incompletely understood. One view is that encountering a pronoun leads the comprehender to reactivate the semantic features of its antecedent. We examined this 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 similar effect at the pronoun. We also 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 semantic priming following the noun, it did not increase following the pronoun. 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' extant representations within working memory.

Effects of Aging on Interference During Pronoun Resolution

PURPOSE

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution.

METHOD

In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun phrases, only 1 of which was a grammatically licit antecedent. Using a gender-mismatch paradigm, we compared to what extent younger and older speakers were sensitive to feature (mis)matches between the pronoun and either of the 2 antecedents. All participants were fluent readers of German and had finished at least secondary education.

RESULTS

Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Older speakers showed greater sensitivity than younger ones to mismatching licit antecedents, but no group showed any evidence of interference from an intervening competitor antecedent. In Experiment 2, we increased the processing demand by using paced word-by-word stimulus presentation and longer sentences. Here, older participants showed reduced sensitivity, in comparison with younger people, to mismatching licit antecedents. Unlike our younger participants, they showed signs of distraction by the presence of a linearly closer but grammatically inappropriate antecedent when no appropriate antecedent was available.

CONCLUSION

Together, our results show that older (but not younger) speakers' ability to compute intrasentential referential dependencies is vulnerable to increased task demands. We briefly discuss a potential role for executive functions, such as interference control.

The Interaction of Contextual and Syntactic Information in the Processing of Turkish Anaphors

In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors o, kendi, and kendisi. The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas o behaves like a pronoun and kendi behaves like a reflexive, kendisi has a more flexible behavior and it can function as both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task, we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isolated sentences and within larger discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants' reading times and their end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained.

Looking forwards and backwards: The real-time processing of Strong and Weak Crossover

We investigated the processing of pronouns in Strong and Weak Crossover constructions as a means of probing the extent to which the incremental parser can use syntactic information to guide antecedent retrieval. In Experiment 1 we show that the parser accesses a displaced wh-phrase as an antecedent for a pronoun when no grammatical constraints prohibit binding, but the parser ignores the same wh-phrase when it stands in a Strong Crossover relation to the pronoun. These results are consistent with two possibilities. First, the parser could apply Principle C at antecedent retrieval to exclude the wh-phrase on the basis of the c-command relation between its gap and the pronoun. Alternatively, retrieval might ignore any phrases that do not occupy an Argument position. Experiment 2 distinguished between these two possibilities by testing antecedent retrieval under Weak Crossover. In Weak Crossover binding of the pronoun is ruled out by the argument condition, but not Principle C. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that antecedent retrieval accesses matching wh-phrases in Weak Crossover configurations. On the basis of these findings we conclude that the parser can make rapid use of Principle C and c-command information to constrain retrieval. We discuss how our results support a view of antecedent retrieval that integrates inferences made over unseen syntactic structure into constraints on backward-looking processes like memory retrieval.

Retrieval and Encoding Interference: Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Anaphor Processing

The main goal of this paper was to disentangle encoding and retrieval interference effects in anaphor processing and thus to evaluate the hypothesis predicting that structurally inaccessible nouns (distractors) are not considered to be potential anaphor antecedents during language processing (Nicol and Swinney, 1989). Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted: one in German, comparing gender-unmarked reflexives and gender-marked pronouns, and two in Russian, comparing gender-marked and -unmarked reflexives. In the German experiment, no interference effects were found. In the first experiment in Russian, an unexpected reading times pattern emerged: in the condition where the distractor matched the gender of the reflexive's antecedent, reading of the gender-unmarked, but not the gender-marked reflexives was slowed down. The same reading times pattern was replicated in a second experiment in Russian where the order of the reflexive and the main verb was inverted. We conclude that the results of the two experiments in Russian are inconsistent with the retrieval interference account, but can be explained by encoding interference and additional semantic processing efforts associated with the processing of gender-marked reflexives. In sum, we found no evidence that would allow us to reject the syntax as an early filer account (Nicol and Swinney, 1989).

Retrieval Interference in Syntactic Processing: The Case of Reflexive Binding in English

It has been proposed that in online sentence comprehension the dependency between a reflexive pronoun such as himself/herself and its antecedent is resolved using exclusively syntactic constraints. Under this strictly syntactic search account, Principle A of the binding theory—which requires that the antecedent c-command the reflexive within the same clause that the reflexive occurs in—constrains the parser's search for an antecedent. The parser thus ignores candidate antecedents that might match agreement features of the reflexive (e.g., gender) but are ineligible as potential antecedents because they are in structurally illicit positions. An alternative possibility accords no special status to structural constraints: in addition to using Principle A, the parser also uses non-structural cues such as gender to access the antecedent. According to cue-based retrieval theories of memory (e.g., Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), the use of non-structural cues should result in increased retrieval times and occasional errors when candidates partially match the cues, even if the candidates are in structurally illicit positions. In this paper, we first show how the retrieval processes that underlie the reflexive binding are naturally realized in the Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model. We present the predictions of the model under the assumption that both structural and non-structural cues are used during retrieval, and provide a critical analysis of previous empirical studies that failed to find evidence for the use of non-structural cues, suggesting that these failures may be Type II errors. We use this analysis and the results of further modeling to motivate a new empirical design that we use in an eye tracking study. The results of this study confirm the key predictions of the model concerning the use of non-structural cues, and are inconsistent with the strictly syntactic search account. These results present a challenge for theories advocating the infallibility of the human parser in the case of reflexive resolution, and provide support for the inclusion of agreement features such as gender in the set of retrieval cues.

The Relationship Between Anaphor Features and Antecedent Retrieval: Comparing Mandarin Ziji and Ta-Ziji

In the present study we report two self-paced reading experiments that investigate antecedent retrieval processes in sentence comprehension by contrasting the real-time processing behavior of two different reflexive anaphors in Mandarin Chinese. Previous work has suggested that comprehenders initially evaluate the fit between the morphologically simple long-distance reflexive "ziji" and the closest available subject position, only subsequently considering more structurally distant antecedents (Gao et al., 2005; Liu, 2009; Li and Zhou, 2010; Dillon et al., 2014; cf. Chen et al., 2012). In this paper, we investigate whether this locality bias effect obtains for other reflexive anaphors in Mandarin Chinese, or if it is associated specifically with the morphologically simple reflexive ziji. We do this by comparing the processing of ziji to the processing of the morphologically complex reflexive ta-ziji (lit. s/he-self). In Experiment 1, we investigate the processing of ziji, and replicate the finding of a strong locality bias effect for ziji in self-paced reading measures. In Experiment 2, we investigate the processing of the morphologically complex reflexive ta-ziji in the same structural configurations as Experiment 1. A comparison of our experiments reveals that ta-ziji shows a significantly weaker locality bias effect than ziji does. We propose that this results from the difference in the number of morphological and semantic features on the anaphor ta-ziji relative to ziji. Specifically, we propose that the additional retrieval cues associated with ta-ziji reduce interference from irrelevant representations in memory, allowing it to more reliably access an antecedent regardless its linear or structural distance. This reduced interference in turn leads to a diminished locality bias effect for the morphologically complex anaphor ta-ziji.

Structure Modulates Similarity-Based Interference in Sluicing: An Eye Tracking study

In cue-based content-addressable approaches to memory, a target and its competitors are retrieved in parallel from memory via a fast, associative cue-matching procedure under a severely limited focus of attention. Such a parallel matching procedure could in principle ignore the serial order or hierarchical structure characteristic of linguistic relations. I present an eye tracking while reading experiment that investigates whether the sentential position of a potential antecedent modulates the strength of similarity-based interference, a well-studied effect in which increased similarity in features between a target and its competitors results in slower and less accurate retrieval overall. The manipulation trades on an independently established Locality bias in sluiced structures to associate a wh-remnant (which ones) in clausal ellipsis with the most local correlate (some wines), as in The tourists enjoyed some wines, but I don't know which ones. The findings generally support cue-based parsing models of sentence processing that are subject to similarity-based interference in retrieval, and provide additional support to the growing body of evidence that retrieval is sensitive to both the structural position of a target antecedent and its competitors, and the specificity or diagnosticity of retrieval cues.

Active search for antecedents in cataphoric pronoun resolution

Cataphoric dependencies where a pronoun precedes its antecedent appear to call on different mechanisms in language comprehension from forward dependencies where the antecedent precedes the pronoun. Previous research has shown that the resolution of cataphoric dependencies involves predictive processes such as the active search mechanism, which hypothesizes the automatic search for an antecedent immediately after encountering a cataphoric pronoun. The current study employs gender mismatch to investigate whether the active search for an antecedent of a cataphoric pronoun is restricted only to grammatically licit positions. We present results from an event-related potential experiment on the reading comprehension of cataphoric dependencies in Dutch. Results show that gender mismatch gives rise to an anterior negativity at grammatically licit antecedent positions only. We hypothesize that this negativity reflects the prediction failure for an antecedent after encountering a pronoun, rather than a gender mismatch. We discuss the timing, topography and functionality of this negativity with respect to previous studies and how this relates to the ERPs elicited in the processing of structural constraints on pronoun resolution.

Interference in the processing of adjunct control

Recent research on the memory operations used in language comprehension has revealed a selective profile of interference effects during memory retrieval. Dependencies such as subject-verb agreement show strong facilitatory interference effects from structurally inappropriate but feature-matching distractors, leading to illusions of grammaticality (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Wagers et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). In contrast, dependencies involving reflexive anaphors are generally immune to interference effects (Sturt, 2003; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013). This contrast has led to the proposal that all anaphors that are subject to structural constraints are immune to facilitatory interference. Here we use an animacy manipulation to examine whether adjunct control dependencies, which involve an interpreted anaphoric relation between a null subject and its licensor, are also immune to facilitatory interference effects. Our results show reliable facilitatory interference in the processing of adjunct control dependencies, which challenges the generalization that anaphoric dependencies as a class are immune to such effects. To account for the contrast between adjunct control and reflexive dependencies, we suggest that variability within anaphora could reflect either an inherent primacy of animacy cues in retrieval processes, or differential degrees of match between potential licensors and the retrieval probe.

Structural constraints on pronoun binding and coreference: evidence from eye movements during reading

A number of recent studies have investigated how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints combine to cue memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. In this paper we investigate how syntactic constraints and gender congruence interact to guide memory retrieval during the resolution of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are always technically ambiguous, and the application of syntactic constraints on their interpretation depends on properties of the antecedent that is to be retrieved. While pronouns can freely corefer with non-quantified referential antecedents, linking a pronoun to a quantified antecedent is only possible in certain syntactic configurations via variable binding. We report the results from a judgment task and three online reading comprehension experiments investigating pronoun resolution with quantified and non-quantified antecedents. Results from both the judgment task and participants' eye movements during reading indicate that comprehenders freely allow pronouns to corefer with non-quantified antecedents, but that retrieval of quantified antecedents is restricted to specific syntactic environments. We interpret our findings as indicating that syntactic constraints constitute highly weighted cues to memory retrieval during anaphora resolution.

Teasing apart retrieval and encoding interference in the processing of anaphors

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing.

The processing of raising and nominal control: an eye-tracking study

According to some views of sentence processing, the memory retrieval processes involved in dependency formation may differ as a function of the type of dependency involved. For example, using closely matched materials in a single experiment, Dillon et al. (2013) found evidence for retrieval interference in subject-verb agreement, but not in reflexive-antecedent agreement. We report four eye-tracking experiments that examine examine reflexive-antecedent dependencies, combined with raising (e.g., "John seemed to Tom to be kind to himself…"), or nominal control (e.g., "John's agreement with Tom to be kind to himself…"). We hypothesized that dependencies involving raising would (a) be processed more quickly, and (b) be less subject to retrieval interference, relative to those involving nominal control. This is due to the fact that the interpretation of raising is structurally constrained, while the interpretation of nominal control depends crucially on lexical properties of the control nominal. The results showed evidence of interference when the reflexive-antecedent dependency was mediated by raising or nominal control, but very little evidence that could be interpreted in terms of interference for direct reflexive-antecedent dependencies that did not involve raising or control. However, there was no evidence either for greater interference, or for quicker dependency formation, for raising than for nominal control.

Aligning grammatical theories and language processing models

We address two important questions about the relationship between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. First, do grammatical theories and language processing models describe separate cognitive systems, or are they accounts of different aspects of the same system? We argue that most evidence is consistent with the one-system view. Second, how should we relate grammatical theories and language processing models to each other?

Local anaphor licensing in an SOV language: implications for retrieval strategies

Because morphological and syntactic constraints govern the distribution of potential antecedents for local anaphors, local antecedent retrieval might be expected to make equal use of both syntactic and morphological cues. However, previous research (e.g., Dillon et al., 2013) has shown that local antecedent retrieval is not susceptible to the same morphological interference effects observed during the resolution of morphologically-driven grammatical dependencies, such as subject-verb agreement checking (e.g., Pearlmutter et al., 1999). Although this lack of interference has been taken as evidence that syntactic cues are given priority over morphological cues in local antecedent retrieval, the absence of interference could also be the result of a confound in the materials used: the post-verbal position of local anaphors in prior studies may obscure morphological interference that would otherwise be visible if the critical anaphor were in a different position. We investigated the licensing of local anaphors (reciprocals) in Hindi, an SOV language, in order to determine whether pre-verbal anaphors are subject to morphological interference from feature-matching distractors in a way that post-verbal anaphors are not. Computational simulations using a version of the ACT-R parser (Lewis and Vasishth, 2005) predicted that a feature-matching distractor should facilitate the processing of an unlicensed reciprocal if morphological cues are used in antecedent retrieval. In a self-paced reading study we found no evidence that distractors eased processing of an unlicensed reciprocal. However, the presence of a distractor increased difficulty of processing following the reciprocal. We discuss the significance of these results for theories of cue selection in retrieval.

A fan effect in anaphor processing: effects of multiple distractors

Research suggests that the presence of a non-referent from the same category as the referent interferes with anaphor resolution. In five experiments, the hypothesis that multiple non-referents would produce a cumulative interference effect (i.e., a fan effect) was examined. This hypothesis was supported in Experiments 1A and 1B, with subjects being less accurate and slower to recognize referents (1A) and non-referents (1B) as the number of potential referents increased from two to five. Surprisingly, the number of potential referents led to a decrease in anaphor reading times. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B replicated the probe-recognition results in a completely within-subjects design and ruled out the possibility that a speeded-reading strategy led to the fan-effect findings. The results of Experiment 3 provided evidence that subjects were resolving the anaphors. These results suggest that multiple non-referents do produce a cumulative interference effect; however, additional research is necessary to explore the effect on anaphor reading times.