Syntactic and discourse-level constraints in native and non-native pronoun resolution
Final Report Abstract
The project investigated how native and non-native speakers of German establish referential dependencies between pronouns and their antecedents during reading. The ability to interpret pronouns quickly and accurately is vital for successful sentence and discourse comprehension. Pronoun resolution is guided by both structural and discourse-level information, but current hypotheses about the timecourse of pronoun resolution differ with regard to the questions of when during processing structure-sensitive and discourse-level constraints come into play, and how they interact over time. Models of pronoun resolution have almost exclusively been informed by data from mature native speakers, and the majority of real-time processing studies have investigated English. The project's principal aim was to test the cross-linguistic and cross-population validity of current theoretical models and hypotheses about real-time pronoun resolution. To this end, we used a highly timecourse-sensitive experimental method, eye-movement monitoring during reading, to examine whether and when during processing syntactic and/or discourselevel information constrain the search for an antecedent. Our non-native participants were native Russian speakers who were highly proficient in German. Our experimental results revealed both similarities and differences between native and non-native comprehenders. Both participant groups behaved essentially alike in that structuresensitive constraints on pronoun interpretation only took effect during later processing stages. This was observed for both anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns. While such a delay was expected for non-native comprehenders, who had shown reduced sensitivity to syntactic information in previous studies, observing a delay in native comprehenders was unexpected given previous findings from studies that used less timecourse-sensitive methods. Between-group differences were observed in how participants' pronoun resolution preferences were guided by discourse-level information. Non-native comprehenders did not use information-structural cues in the same way as our native comprehenders did. While native comprehenders were less likely to consider syntactically focused noun phrases as antecedents for pronouns compared to non-focused ones, our non-native comprehenders were insensitive to syntactic focusing but showed sensitivity to lexical focusing devices instead. In several of our experiments the non-native speakers were moreover drawn more strongly towards topical antecedents than were our native speakers. We also examined whether syntactically-mediated referential dependencies are easier to establish (and thus preferred) than those established at the discourse level. Neither our native nor or non-native group's processing patterns provided any evidence that this was the case, however. Non-native speakers were even less likely than native ones to consider nonreferential (quantificational) antecedents that could not be linked to the pronoun via discourse-based coreference assignment. Taken together, the findings from this project call into question previous assumptions about the real-time status of structure-sensitive constraints on pronoun resolution, and about what kinds of referential dependency should be easier or more difficult to establish. Regarding cross-population processing differences, our results support the hypothesis that non-native comprehenders weight discourse-level information more strongly than native comprehenders do whilst having problems using structural information as efficiently the latter. Our results thus support models of pronoun resolution that allow for constraint weightings to be flexible rather than rigid.
Publications
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(2017). Sensitivity to crossover constraints during native and non-native pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 46(3), 771-789
Felser, C., & Drummer, J.-D.
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(2017). The impact of focus on pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension. Second Language Research 33(4), 403-429
Patterson, C., Esaulova, Y., & Felser, C.
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(2018). Cataphoric pronoun resolution in native and non-native sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 101, 97-113
Drummer, J.-D., & Felser, C.
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(2018). Delayed application of binding condition C during cataphoric pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Patterson, C., & Felser, C.
