Backward- and Forward-Looking Potential of Anaphors

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Personal pronouns and demonstratives serve distinct discourse functions.
• Pronouns encode information differently in mental models.
• Backward-looking pronouns maintain topic; forward-looking pronouns signal shifts.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate processing differences between personal (er) and demonstrative (der) pronouns in German.
• Assess the impact of antecedent prominence (thematic role, position) on pronoun comprehension.
• Examine neurophysiological correlates of backward- and forward-looking functions.

Main Methods:

• Event-related potential (ERP) study with German pronouns (er vs. der).
• Manipulation of verb type and thematic role order to vary antecedent prominence.
• Experiment 2: Story continuation task to assess topic maintenance vs. shift.

Main Results:

• Demonstrative pronouns elicited a biphasic N400-Late Positivity compared to personal pronouns.
• Antecedent prominence, guided by thematic role and position, influenced processing.
• Personal pronouns maintained topic; demonstrative pronouns induced topic shifts.

Conclusions:

• Antecedent prominence calculation relies on thematic role and positional information.
• Referencing less prominent entities with demonstratives incurs processing costs (N400).
• Demonstratives signal topic shifts, leading to attentional reorienting (Late Positivity).