Discourse Context and Sentence Perception. Technical Report No. 176 (original) (raw)
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Resolving Pronominal Ambiguity : Role of Contextual Constraints
study investigates the processing of pronominal ambiguity in the presence of distant antecedents. Participants read narratives in two versions. The continuation version of texts strongly biases toward the target antecedent of the pronoun, contrary to the interruption version. In Experiment 1, we presented probes prior to the sentence containing the pronoun (i.e., the Anaphoric sentence). Results support the conclusion that the target antecedent decreased in activation after the interruption version. The Experiment 2 recorded eye movements during the reading of the Anaphoric sentence. Results suggest the processing of the referential ambiguity was completed at the pronoun location in the continuation version. In contrast, it appears that the referential ambiguity persists during the initial processing in the interruption version. Results are discussed in terms of two competing approaches of language comprehension. The Memory Based Text processing view incorporates a resonance process and the second conception assumes an active-search process.
Roland et al. (2007, 2008) argued that the processing load asymmetry between object and subject relative clauses (ORCs/SRCs) arose from discourse factors rather than structural factors. According to Fox and Thompson (1991), the discourse function of ORCs is to anchor a newly introduced noun to the context. The lack of appropriate context thus makes the processing of ORCs more difficult than that of SRCs. We conducted a self-paced reading experiment using Japanese relative clauses and observed that grounding to the context resolved the processing asymmetry between ORCs and SRCs. The result thus provides another support for the discourse function account.
On the asymmetry between subject and object relative clauses in discourse context
REVISTA DE ESTUDOS DA LINGUAGEM, 2017
This paper investigates the possibility of an effect of contextual information during the processing of sentences containing subject relative clauses (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs) in Brazilian Portuguese. The predictions from one-stage models and from syntaxoriented approaches to sentence processing are outlined. An eye-tracking experiment is reported in which SRCs and ORC were presented when preceded by narrative contexts that could either favor a subject or an object relative clause analysis. The results suggest that ORCs are harder to process when compared to SRCs, no matter what discourse contexts they are inserted in. The contextual effect obtained here can be ascribed to a pre-syntactic priming, ie. a priming effect which arises during lexical access. The possibility of pre- and post-syntactic contextual effects in the processing of RCs is discussed.