Types Of Anaphors Research Articles

The Role of Different Types of Anaphor in the On-Line Resolution of Sentences in a Discourse

Interpreting sentences as part of a larger discourse requires evaluating information in the sentence against the current discourse representation. This paper examines the time course of such sentence resolution processes in two eye-tracking experiments. The experimental passages contained verbs depicting contextually congruent or incongruent events depending upon which of two possible antecedents were assigned to an anaphor. In Experiment 1, immediate effects of detecting the incongruence were found in first pass fixations on the verb but only when the sentences contained pronouns referring unambiguously to focused discourse antecedents. In Experiment 2 where matching name and definite description anaphors were used, the congruence effects were delayed until the second pass refixations of the verb and anaphor. The results are interpreted in relation to the different discourse roles played by different anaphoric devices and considered in relation to Sanford and Garrod′s (1981) Memory Focus model.

Integrative Processes in Utterance Resolution

This study investigates how listeners integrate spoken utterances into a discourse representation. We covary discourse focus (whether the discourse structure foregrounds a particular protagonist), pragmatic inference, and type of anaphoric expression, using a cross-modal naming task where subjects hear a short discourse followed by a sentence fragment. Immediately at the offset of the fragment, a visual probe word is presented. This probe is either an appropriate or inappropriate continuation of the fragment, depending on how the sentence fragment has been interpreted in its discourse context. Naming latencies to the visual probe show that all three factors (pragmatic inference, discourse focus, and type of anaphor) can effectively link utterances to discourses, and that the language comprehension system is highly flexible in its use of different kinds of processing information. We discuss the implications of these findings for Fodor′s modularity hypothesis.

How Natural are Conceptual Anaphors?

This paper reports three experiments on the interpretation of "conceptual" anaphors. These are anaphors that do not have an explicit linguistic antecedent, but one constructed from context. For instance, if one says "I need a knife. Where do you keep them?", them means something like "the knives that I presume you have in your house". In the first experiment, subjects rated sentences containing conceptual anaphors, of three different types, to be as natural as ones with a "linguistically correct" antecedent (e.g. "I need an iron. Where do you keep it?"), and as more natural than ones with neither a plausible conceptual antecedent nor a plausible linguistic one. In a second (self-paced) experiment, subjects judged whether the second sentence in such pairs was a sensible continuation from the first, and the time to make these judgements was measured. We found that acceptability judgements were high, and judgement times low, in just those sentences that were rated as more natural in the first experiment. These first two experiments showed that conceptual anaphors are quite easily understood. However, they did not show that such anaphors are processed without difficulty. In the third experiment, we therefore compared conceptual anaphors ("plate … them") with matched plural anaphors whose antecedents were explicit ("some plates … them"). The results were different for different types of anaphor: in one case (pronouns that referred to collective sets), the conceptual version followed by a plural pronoun was easier than the explicit plural version. For the other two types (references to generics and to implied multiple items), the explicit plurals were understood more rapidly than their conceptual counterparts.

Interpretation of Verb Phrase Anaphora: Influences of Task and Syntactic Context

When listeners hear a sentence like "Will Carey do it?" they must find an interpretation of the phrase "do it", which is an anaphor replacing a full verb phrase (VP). To accomplish this task, listeners may use two sources of information: finding a recent VP that is syntactically appropriate, or using pragmatics to find a recent discourse event that plausibly completes the sentence. One theory of anaphor comprehension says that listeners use both sources of information in a competition for the best antecedent. Another theory says that listeners use only one of those sources, depending on the syntactic class of anaphor. Two experiments are reported, one using a reading time technique and one a sensicality judgement task. The experiments varied the distance of the antecedent from the anaphor, the material that intervened between the antecedent and anaphor, and the syntactic class of the anaphor. In the reading task, the results followed the predictions of the two-source competition theory, as a number of effects were observed, but none of them depended on the anaphor's syntactic class. In the judgement task, however, the type of anaphor did influence judgement time. The overall results suggest that there are important differences between simple comprehension tasks and metalinguistic judgements, and that past empirical conflicts may be explicable on this basis.

Verbal learning meets psycholinguistics: Modality effects in the comprehension of anaphora

Understanding an anaphor like “the latter approach” requires that the reader or listener remember the tempral order of the potential antecedents. According to Glenberg and Swanson's temporal distinctiveness theory, the representation of temporal order is more accurate with auditory presentation than with visual presentation, and this difference is the basis for the modality effect (recently presented auditory information is better recalled than recently presented visual information). We tested this account of modality effects by having subjects listen to or read paragraphs which contained two types of anaphors. Consistent with temporal distinctiveness theory, the resolution of temporal anaphors (e.g., “the latter approach”) showed the modality effect, whereas the resolution of semantically based anaphors (e.g., “the medical approach”) did not. We discuss the implications of this result for understanding the modality effect, the interface between psycholinguistic and memory research, and differences between comprehension of spoken and written language.

Comprehension of Deep and Surface Verbphrase Anaphors

Abstract Linguistic research on anaphora (Hankamer & Sag, 1976; Sag & Hankamer, 1984) suggests that anaphors can be divided into two classes: Surface anaphors that find their antecedents in some level of linguistic representation, and deep anaphors that find their antecedents in a discourse model or a corresponding mental representation. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the syntactic form of the antecedent for a subsequent anaphor would affect the difficulty with which surface anaphors but not deep anaphors would be comprehended. In a “makes-sense” judgement task, surface anaphors were judged to make sense more often when the antecedent was introduced in a phrase that was syntactically parallel to the anaphor than when it was syntactically non-parallel. In contrast, the syntactic form of the antecedent did not affect judgements to the deep anaphors. Parallelism did, however, influence comprehension times for both types of anaphors. The results provide qualified support for the hypothesi...

Linguistic anaphors, levels of representation, and discourse

Abstract Four studies contrast the processing of anaphor resolution for two types of anaphors: pronouns and repeated nouns. The studies suggest that in short discourses anaphor resolution occurs more rapidly for pronouns than repeated nouns. In particular, pronouns provide direct access to a conceptual representation of the antecedent, whereas repeated noun anaphors do so indirectly, priming a surface (lexical) level of representation as a preliminary to accessing the conceptual representation. In each study, subjects were presented with an antecedent-related probe (a modifying adjective) following two sentence discourses ending in a pronoun or repeated noun. Subjects were required to make one of three kinds of judgements about the probe word: recognition, category decision, or lexical decision. Facilitation in the category and lexical decisions was compared to indicate the relative Salitence of either conceptual or surface information about the antecedent probe. Results showed stronger facilitation in th...

Understanding of anaphoric relations in skilled and less skilled comprehenders

This experiment investigated comprehension of four types of anaphor (reference, ellipsis, substitution and lexical) in 7 to 8−year‐old good and poor comprehenders, matched in decoding skills but differing in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders performed less well than skilled comprehenders both in identifying antecedents of anaphors in a story, and in answering questions on the text which required anaphor resolution. Both groups performed more poorly as distance between anaphor and antecedent increased, and poor comprehenders were more adversely affected by distance than good comprehenders for ellipsis. Children's errors are used to suggest differences between the groups in processes of resolving anaphors, in terms of scanning text for appropriate antecedents and integrating text with world knowledge.

Processes of understanding anaphora

Three experiments explored the understanding of anaphoric verb phrases, verb phrases with ellipsis or a substitute element that must be interpreted through reference to an antecedent. For example, Mom tried out the new car after Dad did contains the pro-verb did. Linguistic analysis of anaphoric verb phrases (VPs) suggests that people use two understanding strategies, one accessing a surface representation of the antecedent in short-term memory and one based on plausible reasoning in a mental “discourse model” of the text. Three experiments investigated how these strategies are coordinated in understanding. Subjects read brief stories one sentence at a time, and their reading times were recorded. The results found that a number of factors affected these reading times. First, long antecedents and antecedents that were syntactically “inconsistent” slowed comprehension. Second, both of these effects held primarily when the antecedent was in the preceding sentence; placing the antecedent further away also slowed reading times overall. Third, the experiments found no reliable differences between two different categories of anaphora (“deep” and “surface” anaphora), nor did any of the other effects depend on the type of anaphor. These results suggest constraints on a theory of how readers coordinate syntactic and pragmatic processes used in interpreting anaphoric verb phrases.