Variable binding and coreference in sentence comprehension: evidence from eye movements

Cunnings, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186, Patterson, C. and Felser, C. (2014) Variable binding and coreference in sentence comprehension: evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 71 (1). pp. 39-59. ISSN 0749-596X doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2013.10.001

Abstract/Summary

The hypothesis that pronouns can be resolved via either the syntax or the discourse representation has played an important role in linguistic accounts of pronoun interpretation (e.g. Grodzinsky & Reinhart, 1993). We report the results of an eye-movement monitoring study investigating the relative timing of syntactically-mediated variable binding and discourse-based coreference assignment during pronoun resolution. We examined whether ambiguous pronouns are preferentially resolved via either the variable binding or coreference route, and in particular tested the hypothesis that variable binding should always be computed before coreference assignment. Participants’ eye movements were monitored while they read sentences containing a pronoun and two potential antecedents, a c-commanding quantified noun phrase and a non c-commanding proper name. Gender congruence between the pronoun and either of the two potential antecedents was manipulated as an experimental diagnostic for dependency formation. In two experiments, we found that participants’ reading times were reliably longer when the linearly closest antecedent mismatched in gender with the pronoun. These findings fail to support the hypothesis that variable binding is computed before coreference assignment, and instead suggest that antecedent recency plays an important role in affecting the extent to which a variable binding antecedent is considered. We discuss these results in relation to models of memory retrieval during sentence comprehension, and interpret the antecedent recency preference as an example of forgetting over time.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/35306
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.jml.2013.10.001
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences
Uncontrolled Keywords	Pronoun resolution; Eye movements; Reading; Memory retrieval
Publisher	Elsevier
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