title: "Who" should be focused? The influence of focus status on pronoun resolution.
abstract: Focus is assumed to be able to enhance the salience of a focused constituent and thereby facilitate the interpretation of a pronoun that refers to a focused antecedent relative to an unfocused antecedent. To assess how discourse-based focus structure influences the interpretation of a pronoun and whether this process is modulated by the grammatical role of the antecedent, we conducted an ERP study in which the focus status of a pronoun's potential antecedents was manipulated by means of a wh-question-answer structure. We found that, relative to those in the focused position, pronouns referring to antecedents in the unfocused position evoked enhanced positive responses in both early (180-230 ms) and late time windows (400-800 ms). Moreover, while a larger positivity was evoked by object-referring pronouns compared to subject-referring pronouns in the 400-800 ms time window over the right hemisphere, there was no effect of grammatical role in the 180-230 ms time window. These findings indicate that, while the initial stage of pronoun resolution is modulated by focus information assigned via a wh-question structure, integration of the pronoun and its antecedent into a coherent discourse representation at the later stage could be constrained by various factors, including the focus status and possibly the grammatical role of the antecedent.
authors: School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China. 412alix@gmail.com.
authors: Xiaodong
authors: X
authors: Xu
authors: Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences and School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China. xz104@pku.edu.cn.|Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China. xz104@pku.edu.cn.|Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing, China. xz104@pku.edu.cn.|PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, China. xz104@pku.edu.cn.
authors: Xiaolin
authors: X
authors: Zhou
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: ERPs; Focus; Grammatical role; Pronoun resolution; Wh-question structure