Processing cataphors: Active antecedent search is persistent

Anna Giskes,Dave Kush

doi:10.3758/s13421-021-01176-z

Abstract

Cataphors precede their antecedents, so they cannot be fully interpreted until those antecedents are encountered. Some researchers propose that cataphors trigger an active search during incremental processing in which the parser predictively posits potential antecedents in upcoming syntactic positions (Kazanina et al., Journal of Memory and Language, 56[3], 384–409, 2007). One characteristic of active search is that it is persistent: If a prediction is disconfirmed in an earlier position, the parser should iteratively search later positions until the predicted element is found. Previous research has assumed, but not established, that antecedent search is persistent. In four experiments in English and Norwegian, we test this hypothesis. Two sentence completion experiments show a strong off-line preference for coreference between a fronted cataphor and the first available argument position (the main subject). When the main subject cannot be the antecedent, participants posit the antecedent in the next closest position: object position. Two self-paced reading studies demonstrate that comprehenders actively expect the antecedent of a fronted cataphor to appear in the main clause subject position, and then successively in object position if the subject does not match the cataphor in gender. Our results therefore support the claim that antecedent search is active and persistent.

Highlights

Incremental sentence processing makes use of active or predictive parsing strategies in multiple linguistic domains and at different granularities (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016)
We test whether a property that is often assumed for filler-gap processing, the showcase for active dependency completion, is present in the active search for an antecedent triggered by cataphors
The results from Experiment 1 show a replication of the wellestablished gender-mismatch effect in subject position: When the name in subject position mismatched the gender of the cataphor, readers slowed down at the name region, suggesting that they anticipated coreference with the cataphor

Summary

Introduction

Incremental sentence processing makes use of active or predictive parsing strategies in multiple linguistic domains and at different granularities (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016). A central question in understanding prediction in specific constructions is whether processing is governed by construction-specific subroutines or by more general active parsing mechanisms. We test whether a property that is often assumed for filler-gap processing, the showcase for active dependency completion, is present in the active search for an antecedent triggered by cataphors. Cataphors, such as she in (1), precede their antecedent. The parser cannot immediately interpret a cataphor as soon as it is seen: it must be held ‘unresolved’ in memory until the antecedent is found later in the string and a referential dependency between cataphor and antecedent can be established:

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion