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Related Experiment Videos

When is cataphoric reference recognised?

Ruth Filik1, Anthony J Sanford

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QB, Scotland, UK. r.filik@psy.gla.ac.uk

Cognition
|December 11, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Readers experience immediate processing difficulty with pronouns lacking antecedents, even in subordinate clauses. This suggests incremental interpretation is not suspended, challenging previous linguistic theories.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Pronouns usually require explicit antecedents for smooth discourse processing.
  • Some theories propose that pronouns in preposed subordinate clauses delay antecedent searching until the main clause.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether readers suspend incremental interpretation when encountering a pronoun without an antecedent in a preposed subordinate clause.
  • To test the hypothesis that antecedent resolution is delayed in such grammatical constructions.

Main Methods:

  • An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to monitor readers' processing of sentences with pronouns.
  • Participants read sentences where pronouns either had explicit antecedents or lacked them, in both subordinate and main clauses.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Readers showed immediate processing difficulty upon encountering a pronoun without a prior antecedent.
  • This difficulty occurred regardless of whether the pronoun was in a preposed subordinate clause or not.

Conclusions:

  • The findings suggest that readers attempt incremental interpretation even when a pronoun's antecedent is not yet available.
  • This challenges the notion that processing is suspended for pronouns in preposed subordinate clauses, indicating continuous antecedent searching.