ERIC Number: EJ1172280
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018-Apr
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0090-6905
EISSN: N/A
Exploring the Repeated Name Penalty and the Overt Pronoun Penalty in Spanish
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v47 n2 p377-389 Apr 2018
Anaphoric expressions such as repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns serve a major role in the creation and maintenance of discourse coherence. The felicitous use of an anaphoric expression is highly dependent on the discourse salience of the entity introduced by the antecedent. Gordon et al. ("Cogn Sci" 17:311-347, 1993) showed that, in English, sentences containing repeated names were read more slowly than corresponding sentences containing pronouns when the antecedent of the anaphoric expression was the subject of the previous sentence. This effect was dubbed the Repeated Name Penalty (RNP), and it was further found that this processing delay is eliminated if the antecedent of the anaphoric expression is the object of the previous sentence. The RNP was later extended to Mandarin Chinese (Yang et al. in "Lang Cogn Process" 14:715-743, 1999) and to Spanish (Gelormini-Lezama and Almor in "Lang Cogn Process" 26(3):437-454, 2011), which suggests that this might be a universal phenomenon. Moreover, the Spanish results showed an additional effect: sentences containing overt pronouns were read more slowly than corresponding sentences containing null pronouns when the antecedent of the anaphoric expression was the subject of the previous sentence. This effect was dubbed the Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP) and, like the original RNP, the effect is also eliminated if the antecedent is in object position (Gelormini-Lezama and Almor 2011; Gordon et al. 1993). The similarity of the RNP and the OPP in Spanish suggests that these two processing phenomena might be caused by the same underlying principles. This paper is a critical review of the literature on these processing delays in Spanish and an attempt to integrate the data in a unified framework. Specifically, and following pragmatic explanations like the Informational Load Hypothesis (Almor in "Psychol Rev" 106:748-765, 1999), the RNP and OPP in Spanish can be understood as superficial manifestations of an imbalance between processing cost and discourse function.
Descriptors: Spanish, Form Classes (Languages), Language Processing, Language Universals, Linguistic Theory, Sentence Structure, Reading Processes, Pragmatics, Language Research, Psycholinguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Information Analyses; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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