Coargumenthood and the processing of pronouns

ABSTRACT

We report three eye-movement experiments and an offline task investigating structural constraints on pronoun resolution in different contexts. This included “coargument” contexts in which a pronoun was the direct object of a verb (“The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had noticed him”), so-called picture noun phrases (“The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had a picture of him”) and picture noun phrases with a possessor (“The surgeon remembered about Jonathan’s picture of him”). In each eye-movement experiment, we observed longer reading times when the nonlocal antecedent (“the surgeon”) mismatched in stereotypical gender with the pronoun, but little evidence of the gender of the local antecedent (“Jonathan”) influencing reading times. The offline task suggested readers occasionally interpret pronouns as referring to local antecedents, especially in non-coargument contexts. These results suggest that structural constraints constitute more highly weighted cues to antecedent retrieval than gender congruency during the initial stages of memory retrieval during pronoun resolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Anaphora resolution
• memory retrieval
• eye movements
• reading

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. All remaining errors are our own. The research reported in this paper was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant number pf100026).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ian Cunnings http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186

Notes

1. Data and analysis code for the four experiments reported in this paper can be found at the first author’s OSF website (https://osf.io/v93wg/).

2. An anonymous reviewer queried this interpretation of our results. As the nonlocal antecedent effect was calculated across both regions, it might be that there is no significant effect of the nonlocal antecedent at the pronoun region itself, which would complicate our interpretation of the time-course of nonlocal and local antecedent effects. Even though the region by nonlocal antecedent interaction was not significant, we conducted an additional analysis of the regression path times at each region separately to address this issue. This yielded significant main effects of the gender of the nonlocal antecedent at both regions (for the pronoun region, estimate = 28, SE = 13, t = 2.20, p = .028; for the spillover region, estimate = 80, SE = 38, t = 2.10, p = .036), in the absence of any other significant effects (all t < 1.17, all p > .245). We thus maintain that these results are consistent with our interpretation of the time-course of nonlocal and local antecedent effects.

3. The model was fit using the bobyqa optimiser. The maximal model did not converge but removing the random correlation parameters led to convergence.

4. Kaiser et al. also examined PPNPs and found little evidence that the possessor was ever considered as a potential antecedent for the pronoun, irrespective of their pragmatic manipulation. This might be taken to suggest that binding constraints interact with pragmatic factors for PNP but not PPNP pronouns. Note however that in the PPNP materials tested by Kaiser et al. (“Peter told/heard from Andrew about Greg’s picture of him”), it is not possible to manipulate the interaction of pragmatic factors and binding constraints, as it is not possible to manipulate the “perceiver” status of the possessor. Thus, it is difficult to draw any strong conclusions about potential differences in the role of pragmatic information in PNP and PPNP contexts.

5. We thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting the possible role of inhibition in implementing Principle B.

6. We note that both of these accounts may have difficulty in constraining pronoun resolution in sentences such as “The father of Kevin introduced him” or “Kevin’s father introduced him”, where the accessible antecedent (“Kevin”) is syntactically local but does not c-command the pronoun. Two features would be required here, one that encodes syntactic locality and one that tracks c-command, to fully account for these binding restrictions. How antecedent retrieval is constrained during processing, for either reflexives or pronouns, for these types of constructions is unknown however, and remains an avenue for future research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy [grant number pf100026].