title: Informativity renders a referent more accessible: Evidence from eyetracking.
abstract: The amount of information attached to a noun phrase (henceforth, NP) has been shown to enhance accessibility and increase pronominal reference in language production. However, both the effect of information quantity on the comprehension of ambiguous pronouns and the time course of any informativity effect have been left unexplored. In two eyetracking experiments, we investigated how additional information on the part of NP referents influenced the resolution of following ambiguous pronouns. The results of the first experiment revealed an informativity effect, with more looks to the informationally richer referent than to the competitor. However, the effect of additional information emerged late in time when the referent was the object of the verb. The second experiment replicated the results of the first and also showed that, consistent with the online results, an ambiguous pronoun is interpreted as referring to the informationally richer NP in an offline, explicit pronoun resolution task. The results lend support to theories of language processing that assume that explicit information increases the accessibility of the associated concept, in contrast to approaches that assume that accessibility is associated with givenness.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Davis, CA, USA. karimi@ucdavis.edu.|Department of Psychology, University of California at Davis, 135 Young Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616, USA. karimi@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: Hossein
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Karimi
authors.affiliation: University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Fernanda
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ferreira
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Informativity; NP length; NP position; Pronoun resolution; Time course