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Abstract:
How readers select a pronoun's antecedent bears on the
theoretical relationship between syntactic and semantic linguistic
information. Pronouns refer to the same thing as their antecedents,
yet the potential antecedents for a definite pronoun (e.g., "she")
are constrained syntactically; an antecedent may not occur within
the pronoun's own clause and must share the pronoun's gender. When
the sole noun in a sentence disagrees with the pronoun's gender,
subjects display an ERP marker for syntactic anomaly (P600 effect)
suggesting a tendency to interpret the two as coreferential despite
the agreement violation. If readers initially select a default
antecedent based on structural considerations they should also show
a P600 effect when that default noun disagrees with the pronoun.
The presence or absence of a P600 effect can thus index whether
syntactic factors assign to a sentence's nouns a hierarchy of
suitability antecedent status. ERPs were recorded to pronouns in
sentences of four types. A P600 effect occurred only when a sole,
disagreeing noun was in the sentence. The addition of a second,
agreeing noun obliterated the effect even when that noun occurred
in object versus subject position, in a subordinate clause, or
across an independent clause boundary. These data suggest that the
nouns occurring within a given sentence form a natural set of
candidate antecedents with none structurally favored during online
language comprehension.
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