Abstract
The experiments presented here investigated the interplay of language-specific and language-independent factors influencing within-sentence anaphora resolution. Using the visual-world paradigm, we looked at interpretation preferences in French and German. We investigated the effects of both the information status and the grammatical role of the first-mentioned referent on pronoun interpretation. The results show that the effects of grammatical role are different in the two languages: there is a clear lasting preference for the object in French but not in German. Explicitly topicalizing or focusing the first referent, however, has similar effects in the two languages: topicalization leads to more binding of ambiguous pronouns to a potential antecedent than focusing. We argue that this effect is independent of antecedent salience.
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Notes
- 1.
Clefted objects in French seem to follow this pattern less clearly, which can be explained by the fact that they are harder to understand online and sometimes not fully interpreted (see Reichle 2012).
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Acknowledgments
We thank Pirita Pyykkönen and Daniel Holt for giving us the opportunity to collect the German data as well as their help with running the experiment and finding participants.
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Colonna, S., Schimke, S., Hemforth, B. (2014). Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-World Paradigm. In: Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds) Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_7
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