ERIC Number: EJ1141485
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-Jun
Pages: 26
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0090-6905
EISSN: N/A
The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution
Järvikivi, Juhani; van Gompel, Roger P. G.; Hyönä, Jukka
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v46 n3 p525-550 Jun 2017
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.
Descriptors: Form Classes (Languages), Psycholinguistics, Eye Movements, Semantics, Finno Ugric Languages, Heuristics, Ambiguity (Semantics), Role, Grammar, Attribution Theory, Correlation, Language Processing, Structural Analysis (Linguistics), Language Research
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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Authoring Institution: N/A
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