Abstract
Real-time interpretation of pronouns is sometimes sensitive to the presence of grammatically-illicit antecedents and sometimes not. This occasional sensitivity has been taken as evidence that structural constraints do not immediately impact the initial antecedent retrieval for pronoun interpretation. We argue that it is important to separate effects that reflect the initial antecedent retrieval process from those that reflect later processes. We present results from five reading comprehension experiments. Both the current results and previous evidence support the hypothesis that agreement features and structural constraints immediately constrain the antecedent retrieval process for pronoun interpretation. Occasional sensitivity to grammatically-illicit antecedents may be due to repair processes triggered when the initial retrieval fails to return a grammatical antecedent.
Highlights
This paper is concerned with how different kinds of linguistic constraints are used in memory retrieval processes in the course of real-time comprehension
We focus on the structural constraint known as Binding Principle B (Chomsky, 1981): roughly, a pronoun cannot be bound by an antecedent within its local clause
The three-way repeated measures ANOVA in the pronoun region revealed a significant main effect of embedded match in the by-participant analysis [F1(1, 35) = 5.84, p < 0.05; F2(1, 59) = 3.33, p = 0.07]: reading times were longer when the embedded subject mismatched the pronoun in gender
Summary
This paper is concerned with how different kinds of linguistic constraints are used in memory retrieval processes in the course of real-time comprehension. The interpretation of such pronouns almost always requires the identification of an antecedent from the previous discourse, so they reliably trigger memory retrieval processes in comprehension. The dependency between a pronoun and its antecedent is subject to several kinds of linguistic constraints. The outcome of the antecedent retrieval process is potentially quite informative about whether the memory system is able to take advantage of different kinds of linguistic constraints to aid sentence processing. Agreement constraints require that the pronoun and its antecedent share certain features, such as number, person, gender, and animacy. Structural constraints require that the antecedent bear certain relations to the pronoun in the syntactic and discourse representations. We focus on the structural constraint known as Binding Principle B (Chomsky, 1981): roughly, a pronoun cannot be bound by an antecedent within its local clause. In (1), ‘Peter’ cannot be the antecedent for ‘him’ because it would bind the pronoun from within the local clause
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
