[CaCL] Reading for Thursday, 10/26: Foraker and McElree 2007

[Evan Jaffe]

Hi all,

This Thursday, 10/26, we'll be discussing:

The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active vs. passive
representations (Foraker and McElree 2007)

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f95b/4d64fa5a3d33502fe61f143efd8e1fbadf24.pdf

Abstract:

A prominent antecedent facilitates anaphor resolution. Speed-accuracy
tradeoff modeling in Experiments 1 and 3 indicated that clefting did not
affect the speed of accessing an antecedent representation, which is
inconsistent with claims that discourse-focused information is actively
maintained in focal attention [e.g., Gundel, J. K. (1999). On different
kinds of focus. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt, (Eds.), Focus:
Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press]. Rather, clefting simply increased the
likelihood of retrieving the antecedent representation, suggesting that
clefting only increases the strength of a representation in memory. Eye
fixation measures in Experiment 2 showed that clefting did not affect
early bonding of the pronoun and antecedent, but did ease later
integration. Collectively, the results indicate that clefting made
antecedent representations more distinctive in working memory, hence
more available for subsequent discourse operations. Pronoun type also
affected resolution processes. Gendered pronouns (he or she) were
interpreted more accurately than an ungendered pronoun (it), and in one
case, earlier in time-course. We argue that both effects are due to the
greater ambiguity of it, as a cue to retrieve the correct antecedent
representation.