What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution

ABSTRACT

Pronouns serve a critical referential function, yet the cognitive processes engaged during pronoun comprehension remain incompletely understood. One view is that encountering a pronoun leads the comprehender to reactivate the semantic features of its antecedent. We examined this by manipulating the concreteness of a noun antecedent and assessing whether an Event Related Potential (ERP) concreteness effect was elicited at a downstream pronoun. We observed a robust concreteness effect at the noun, but no similar effect at the pronoun. We also examined whether N400 semantic priming from the antecedent would increase on content words shortly following the pronoun, relative to those preceding it. Again, although we observed semantic priming following the noun, it did not increase following the pronoun. Our data suggest that pronouns do not induce the activation of (much) new semantic information in long-term memory, perhaps instead triggering an attentional shift towards their antecedents’ extant representations within working memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Reference
• pronoun
• concreteness
• N400
• semantic memory

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Professors Gary S. Dell and Cynthia L. Fisher for helpful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 One sentence pair was excluded from the analysis because both its concrete and abstract critical nouns were not present in the corpus used to generate our semantic similarity scores.

2 At the noun from 300–500 ms, Bayes factors using the same rscale values as the pronoun analysis favoured the alternative hypothesis 17.7 to 1 at frontal sites, 27.2 to 1 at posterior sites, 49.9 to 1 over the whole head. In the 500–900 ms window, the null hypothesis was favoured over the alternative at the noun over the front, back and whole head. Bayes factors at individual electrode sites in favour of the alternative hypothesis at the noun (reciprocal, 1/K, of K’s reported for the pronoun), from 300 to 500 ms, ranged from 1.8 to 76, median = 6.3, showing evidence for the alternative at every site, and from 500 to 900 ms, ranged from .5 to 3.5, median = .7, with only two sites showing evidence in favour of the alternative (LLFr and RMPf). Thus, we obtained strong evidence in favour of a concreteness effect at the noun from 300 to 500 ms, in contrast with our findings at the pronoun.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (1144245) and a Neuroengineering IGERT training fellowship to C.M.S. (0903622), and grants from the National Institute of Health (AG2630) and the James S. McDonnell Foundation to K.D.F.