Age differences in resolving anaphoric expressions during reading

ABSTRACT

One crucial component of reading comprehension is the ability to bind current information to earlier text, which is often accomplished via anaphoric expressions (e.g., pronouns referring to previous nouns). Processing time for anaphors that violate expectations (e.g., ‘The firefighter burned herself while rescuing victims from the building’) provide a window into how the semantic representation of the referent is instantiated and retained up to the anaphor. We present data from three eye-tracking experiments examining older and younger adults' reading patterns for passages containing such local expectancy violations. Younger adults quickly registered and resolved the expectancy violation at the point at which it first occurred (as measured by increased gaze duration on the anaphor), regardless of whether sentences were read in isolation or embedded in a discourse context. Older adults, however, immediately noticed the violation only when sentences were embedded in discourse context, suggesting that they relied more on situational grounding to instantiate the referent. For neither young nor old did prior disambiguation within the context (e.g., stating the firefighter was a woman) reduce the effect of the local violation on early processing. For older readers, however, prior disambiguation facilitated anaphor resolution by reducing reprocessing. These results suggest that (a) anaphor resolution unfolds serially, such that prior disambiguating context does not ‘inoculate’ against local activation of salient (but contextually inappropriate) features, and that (b) older readers use the situational grounding of discourse context to support earlier access to the antecedent, and are more likely to reprocess the context for anaphor resolution.

Keywords:

• Cognition
• Aging
• Language
• Anaphora
• Eye-tracking

Acknowledgments

Parts of this research were possible thanks to gracious support from the Retirement Research Foundation, Division 20 of the American Psychological Association, the Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Illinois, and the National Institute on Aging (Grant R01 AG13935). We also wish to thank Kiel Christianson, Xuefei Gao, Susan Garnsey, Sandra Goss Lucas, and Soo Rim Noh for input on various aspects of the research.

Notes

¹ We also examined two regions in the second sentence: (a) the context noun (gender-disambiguating vs. gender-neutral; e.g., man/woman vs. worker), and (b) the role noun: global antecedent word in sentence two (i.e., the first mention of the gender stereotyped role). In general the data on the context noun showed that all readers were sensitive to the early expectancy violation (e.g., when the firefighter was described as a woman in the gender-disambiguating mismatch condition). The data on the global antecedent did not show any reliable effects of reprocessing for either age group, suggesting it was not a frequent target for rereading (fixation patterns on the global antecedent were also not reliably correlated with verbal working memory span).

² GPT may be a relatively insensitive measure of late processing for longer texts. The large amount of prior text invites great variation in rereading. When faced with confusion at the point of the anaphor, there is great inter-individual variability in rereading strategies; this was apparent in very large standard errors we found for GPT. For example, some readers may reread only the local (i.e., the last) sentence, while others reread earlier parts of the text to ensure comprehension. Such differences in reading styles are difficult to categorize.

FIGURE 2. Gaze duration on the reflexive pronoun for younger and older adults as a function of expectancy and context in Experiment 2A.