Real-time Processing of Pronouns With Contrastive Stress

Abstract:

The purpose of this experiment is to examine the interaction of prosodic cues and pronoun referent assignment during early stages of processing. In particular, we investigate whether contrastive stress on a pronoun effects the real-time activation of the pronoun's referent. Judgments from 128 native English speakers were gathered on sentences such as the following:

"The cowboy pushed the robber into the chairs by the bar and the waiter pushed him/HIM into the poker table by the staircase."

Offline results show that most listeners assign 'robber' to the pronoun in sentences without contrastive stress, but prefer 'cowboy' when emphasis is placed on the pronoun.

A cross-modal naming task was used to investigate the time course of referent activation during on-going comprehension of the same sentences. A subject listened to uninterrupted sentences over headphones while watching a computer screen. At some point during each sentence, a string of letters appeared on the screen and the subject read the word aloud into a microphone. Probe words appeared either at a baseline position 800 ms before the pronoun or at the offset of the pronoun. Naming reaction times for probes semantically related to the second NP were compared to unrelated control probes matched for a prior reaction time and frequency. We observed reactivation of the correct pronoun referent immediately at the pronoun in sentences without contrastive stress, and also in sentences with contrastive stress on the pronoun, (the later contrary to the offline preferences). Our results indicate that a pronoun's referent is accessed immediately upon hearing the pronoun and that contrastive stress does not interfere with this early syntactic process.

Further research is being undertaken to determine whether all structurally legal referents are accessed in these sentence types and whether prosodic cues affect activation patterns downstream.

* p < .05 (paired comparisons)

N = 80