Who do you refer to? How young students with mild intellectual disability confront anaphoric ambiguities in texts and sentences.

Abstract

Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellectual disability in comparison with chronological and reading age-matched groups. In Experiment 1, the anaphor test of Elosúa, Carriedo, and García-Madruga (2009) confirmed that readers with intellectual disability (ID) are slower than control readers resolving clitic anaphoric pronouns, especially when the use of morphological cues (e.g. gender) is necessary. In order to test if the poor performance could be due to low levels of metacognitive skills during reading, an inconsistency detection task combined with eye tracking was designed in Experiment 2. Participants read short texts with an anaphoric pronoun in the fifth sentence, either morphologically (gender) consistent or not with the information provided in the second sentence. The scores in the anaphor comprehension questions presented after the text confirmed that readers with ID are affected by the gender inconsistency but they are unable to explicitly report it and recover from it, as the number of re-fixations after reading the critical sentence suggests. As their answers to the explicit detection questions showed, the adults control group did not show any preference for morphosyntax or semantics in spite of being aware of the inconsistency. In sum, both groups of readers with and without ID are affected by inconsistencies, but ID readers do not have appropriate metacognitive skills to explicitly identify the source of the inconsistency and fix it.