The interplay of implicit causality, structural heuristics, and anaphor type in ambiguous pronoun resolution

TY - JOUR

T1 - The interplay of implicit causality, structural heuristics, and anaphor type in ambiguous pronoun resolution

AU - Järvikivi, Juhani

AU - van Gompel, Roger P. G.

AU - Hyönä, Jukka

N1 - Suomen Akatemia (106418), Leverhulme Trust (F/00143E).

PY - 2017/6

Y1 - 2017/6

N2 - Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun hän and the demonstrative tämä preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; tämä was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected hän and tämä differently: we found a first-mention preference for hän, but a second-mention preference for tämä. The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect.

AB - Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun hän and the demonstrative tämä preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; tämä was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected hän and tämä differently: we found a first-mention preference for hän, but a second-mention preference for tämä. The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect.

KW - Implicit causality

KW - Visual-world eye-tracking

KW - Pronoun resolution

KW - Comprehension

U2 - 10.1007/s10936-016-9451-1

DO - 10.1007/s10936-016-9451-1

M3 - Article

C2 - 27629115

SN - 0090-6905

VL - 46

SP - 525

EP - 550

JO - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

IS - 3

ER -