title: Antecedent Frequency Effects on Anaphoric Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from Spanish.
abstract: High-frequency words are usually understood and produced faster than low-frequency words. Although the effect of word frequency is a reliable phenomenon in many domains of language processing, it remains unclear whether and how frequency affects pronominal anaphoric resolution. We evaluated this issue by means of two self-paced reading experiments. Native speakers of Spanish read sentences containing the anaphoric noun or pronoun at the subject syntactic position (Experiment 1) or at the object syntactic position (Experiment 2) while the antecedent of the anaphor was either a high-frequency or a low-frequency word. Results showed that nominal anaphors were read faster when referring to high-frequency than to low-frequency antecedents, and faster when referring to subjects than to objects. Critically, pronoun reading times were unaffected by the frequency and by the syntactic position of the antecedent. These results are congruent with theories assuming that syntactic information of the words is not frequency sensitive.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Unibertsitateko Ibilbidea 5, 01006, Vitoria, Spain.
authors.forename: Nerea
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Egusquiza
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Navarrete
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Unibertsitateko Ibilbidea 5, 01006, Vitoria, Spain. adam.zawis@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zawiszewski
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D013060:Speech
keywords: Anaphor resolution; Pronoun; Self-paced reading; Word frequency