The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

• Published in: Journal of psycholinguistic research Vol. 46; no. 3; pp. 525 - 550
• Main Authors: Järvikivi, Juhani, van Gompel, Roger P. G., Hyönä, Jukka
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2017; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Ambiguity (Semantics); Anaphora; Antecedents; Attribution Theory; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Bias; Causality; Cognitive Psychology; Comprehension - physiology; Correlation; Eye Movements; Eye Movements - physiology; Finland; Finnish language; Finno Ugric Languages; Form Classes (Languages); Grammar; Grammatical subject; Heuristic; Heuristics; Humans; Language; Language Processing; Language Research; Preferences; Pronouns; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Role; Semantic roles; Semantics; Semiotics; Structural Analysis (Linguistics); Finnish; Visual-world eye-tracking; Implicit causality; Comprehension; Pronoun resolution
• ISSN: 0090-6905; 1573-6555; 1573-6555
• DOI: 10.1007/s10936-016-9451-1

Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun hän and the demonstrative tämä preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; tämä was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected hän and tämä differently: we found a first-mention preference for hän , but a second-mention preference for tämä . The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect.