Abstract
Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of pronouns in German-speaking adults. Word order of the antecedents and parallelism by the grammatical role of the anaphor was modified in the study. The results show that parallelism of the grammatical role had an early and strong effect on the processing of the pronoun, with subject anaphors being resolved to subject antecedents and object anaphors to object antecedents, regardless of the word order (information status) of the antecedents. Our results demonstrate that personal pronouns may not in general be associated with the subject or topic of a sentence but that their resolution is modulated by additional factors such as the grammatical role. Further studies are required to investigate whether parallelism also affects offline antecedent choices.
Highlights
Pronoun resolution has “traditionally” been examined separately by linguists and psychologists
We report on a visual world eye-tracking study that aimed to examine the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of personal pronouns
The results showed that grammatical role parallelism influenced online pronoun resolution in both word orders
Summary
Pronoun resolution has “traditionally” been examined separately by linguists and psychologists. More recently both areas have come closer together. This lead to the insight that anaphor/pronoun resolution is influenced by several factors. The eye-tracking technique in the visual world paradigm has been shown to be useful to examine pronoun/anaphor resolution during online processing. In this paradigm, an auditory stimulus is presented together with visual stimuli (e.g., two pictures) with the eye-movements on the pictures reflecting pronoun resolution preferences. We used the visual world paradigm to investigate the impact of grammatical role parallelism which may likely to occur during online processing, i.e., exactly when the pronoun is processed (Smyth, 1994)
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