Linguistic anaphors, levels of representation, and discourse

Abstract

Four studies contrast the processing of anaphor resolution for two types of anaphors: pronouns and repeated nouns. The studies suggest that in short discourses anaphor resolution occurs more rapidly for pronouns than repeated nouns. In particular, pronouns provide direct access to a conceptual representation of the antecedent, whereas repeated noun anaphors do so indirectly, priming a surface (lexical) level of representation as a preliminary to accessing the conceptual representation. In each study, subjects were presented with an antecedent-related probe (a modifying adjective) following two sentence discourses ending in a pronoun or repeated noun. Subjects were required to make one of three kinds of judgements about the probe word: recognition, category decision, or lexical decision. Facilitation in the category and lexical decisions was compared to indicate the relative Salitence of either conceptual or surface information about the antecedent probe. Results showed stronger facilitation in the category task following the pronoun. In contrast, facilitation in the lexical decision task occurred only following the noun-anaphor. In the recognition study, response times to the probe words were faster following the pronoun and showed a greater facilitation for concrete than for abstract probes. The concreteness effect for the pronoun condition is taken as additional support for the notion that pronouns provided greater immediate sensitivity to the conceptual aspects of the antecedent. When the probe word was presented at a 250-msec delay, responses following the noun-anaphor also showed a greater facilitation to the concrete probes. This finding indicates that the noun-anaphor ultimately shows sensitivity to the conceptual information of the antecedent.