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Abstract:
Most psycholinguistic studies of anaphora have focused on NP
anaphors. Less is known about the processing of VP anaphors. We
conducted two studies to determine (1) whether VP anaphors, like
NP anaphors, facilitate recognition of their antecedents and (2)
how much information from the antecedent is reactivated.
Experiment 1 examined whether a verb probe taken from either
the first or second clause of a context sentence would be
recognized faster following a VP anaphor that refers to the
probe's clause of origin relative to one that does not, as
illustrated in (1).
(1) a. Mike bought a diamond ring because he wants to propose
to his girlfriend.
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Congruent |
Incongruent |
| b. His friends don't believe he did it. |
BOUGHT |
PROPOSE |
| c. His friends don't believe he'll do it. |
PROPOSE |
BOUGHT |
We predicted that a verb probe would be recognized faster when
it was congruent with the antecedent of a VP anaphor than when it
was not, but that congruence would interact with recency. As
predicted, recognition times were faster for congruent probes
than incongruent probes. Moreover, near probes were recognized
faster than far probes and the difference between congruent and
incongruent probes was greater for near antecedents than far
ones. These results demonstrate that VP anaphors facilitate the
recognition of their antecedents above and beyond any effects
that might be attributed to recency.
To determine whether VP anaphors facilitated recognition of
other information in the VP antecedent, in Experiment 2 we
presented context sentences (2a) followed by sentences containing
either a VP anaphor (2b), a direct object NP anaphor (2c), or a
subject NP anaphor (2d). Anaphor sentences were then immediately
probed with either the verb or direct object of the antecedent
VP.
(2)
a. Bill was supposed to clean his room.
b. His mom got mad when he didn't do it.
c. It was a mess.
d. He was so sloppy
PROBES: CLEAN or ROOM
Noun probes took no longer to recognize than verb probes
following VP anaphors. In contrast, noun probes were recognized
significantly faster than verb probes following direct object
anaphors. Moreover, recognition of verb probes was significantly
faster following VP anaphors than following subject NP anaphors.
These results indicate that VP anaphors reactivate both verb and
direct object antecedent concepts. More generally, the results of
Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that probe recognition can be
useful for studying VP anaphora as well as NP anaphora.
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