Reasoning about alternative forms is costly: The processing of null and overt pronouns in Italian using pupillary responses

ABSTRACT

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Different terms have been used to describe a referent’s prominence in the discourse, such as accessibility (Ariel, 1990), givenness (Gundel et al., 1993), and topicality (Givón, 1983). We use the notion of prominence as an operationalization of a multitude of factors that influence how accessible, given, or topical a referent is.

² One reason for the difference in amplitude in the different studies could therefore be the lighting conditions in the labs. That is, due to different lighting conditions, the baseline pupil could have been closer to a minimal or maximal level of dilation. Therefore, we might have observed floor or ceiling effects. Our results suggest that that it was darker in the lab in Groningen in which the Dutch participants of Vogelzang et al. (2016) were tested than in the lab in Milan in which our Italian participants were tested. Regrettably, no reliable data are available on this difference. However, our assumption is that the pupils of the participants of Vogelzang et al. were already more dilated and thus expanded less.

³ When comparing anaphoric subjects in different languages, it is unavoidable to test these subjects in combination with other aspects of the languages. Thus, other factors could have influenced the observed processing differences, such as pragmatic, syntactic, morphological, and lexical factors. The experiments were kept as similar as possible in design and materials to allow for a direct comparison between Italian and Dutch, but nevertheless care must be taken when interpreting the observed differences.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]; Cluster of Excellence DFG 1077 “Hearing4all”).