engleski

Implicit causality and structural biases in pronoun ambiguity resolution: an eye-tracking study

Sentence processing necessarily involves ambiguity resolution ; even unambiguous words are temporally ambiguous as linguistic input unfolds. Sometimes ambiguity is not merely temporal and can impede comprehension. One such ambiguity is anaphoric ambiguity, which means that comprehenders are unable to select a unique referent for an anaphor among several candidates. 3rd person anaphoric pronouns are prone to ambiguity because they are lexically impoverished and their grammatical features do not always ensure the retrieval of the unique referent. Languages resort to various means to resolve pronoun ambiguity (e.g. morphologically marked verbs indicating co-reference in switch reference systems). From a psycholinguistic perspective, it is interesting to see what influences pronoun ambiguity resolution (PAR) when disambiguating cues are not available. Much of the research focuses on the salience/accessibility of the referent. Salient entities are more easily retrievable in mental representations and are therefore more likely to be selected as pronoun referents. Factors that confer salience include implicit causality (IC) and structural bias. IC is considered to be the property of certain verbs that draws the attention of comprehenders to the referent that is likely to be the cause of the event or state. Structural bias is influenced by the correlation between the pronoun and the grammatical role of the referent, with the subject being more salient than the object. Previous theoretical approaches considered these biases separately, so PAR has been studied as an isolated phenomenon. The probabilistic approach builds on the assumption that PAR is determined by the interplay of IC and structural biases. These biases are probabilistic, i.e. they do not represent absolute certainty, and their strength may vary. The probabilistic approach is situated in a strongly incremental theory in which sentence processing occurs moment-by-moment. PAR is a predictive process. The probabilistic approach has not been thoroughly investigated in pro- drop languages where a personal pronoun can be omitted in the subject position. A common assumption is that null and overt pronouns show a complementary distribution in terms of structural bias. The null pronoun prefers the subject and the overt pronoun prefers the object. Several studies conducted within the probabilistic approach have shown that the interplay of biases varies across languages. In our ongoing study, we aim to observe PAR with respect to the interplay of IC and structural biases in Croatian, a pro-drop language. The study will be conducted using an eye-tracking method to capture both the early and late stages of referent anticipation during sentence processing. In the presentation, experimental stimuli, participant characteristics, procedure, and eye-tracker measures will be presented and discussed.

sentence processing ; implicit causality ; pro-drop language ; eye-tracking

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