Anaphoric Islands and Anaphoric Forms: The Role of Explicit and Implicit Focus

ABSTRACT

Two experiments are reported in which people resolve references to sets of entities (e.g., lies) that have previously been introduced either explicitly into a text (“the lies”) or implicitly via a cognate verb (a form of the verb “to lie”). Previous work has show that pronominal references to such entities were judged as relatively unacceptable and required longer judgement times when judgements were positive compared with cases in which the antecedent was explicit. This finding suggests that the inference from the activity of lying to a set of lies is made in the backward direction. New results show a different pattern, with no penalty in either times or acceptability judgements for the implicit case. The results are discussed in terms of hypotheses about reference processing and the notion of the centrality of an antecedent in a scenario.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the editors for the invitation to contribute to this special issue. We all have fond memories of Tony.

Funding

Our research was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council research grant R000236481 (“Mental models in text comprehension: Constraints on interference”).

Notes

¹ It might be thought that the explicit (NP) antecedent, NP anaphor condition is contaminated by a “repeated name” penalty (Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993). However, there was no evidence that such a penalty occurred. Despite the greater length of the crucial part of the sentence in the NP anaphor condition, reading times were only 70 ms longer in that condition than in the pronominal anaphor, explicit antecedent condition (both Fs n.s.). In Experiment 2 the corresponding reading time difference was only 16 ms (both Fs n.s.).

² A combined analysis of the data from Experiments 1 and 2 provided no evidence, either in times or in judgements, for any difference in the pattern of the results between the two experiments (i.e., there were no interactions that included the experiment factor).

Additional information

Funding

Our research was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council research grant R000236481 (“Mental models in text comprehension: Constraints on interference”).