title: The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution.
abstract: Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigating pronoun resolution in Finnish examined the time course of implicit causality information relative to both grammatical role and order-of-mention information. Experiment 1 showed an effect of implicit causality that appeared at the same time as the first-mention preference. Furthermore, when we counterbalanced the semantic roles of the verbs, we found no effect of grammatical role, suggesting the standard observed subject preference has a large semantic component. Experiment 2 showed that both the personal pronoun hän and the demonstrative tämä preferred the antecedent consistent with the implicit causality bias; tämä was not interpreted as referring to the semantically non-prominent entity. In contrast, structural prominence affected hän and tämä differently: we found a first-mention preference for hän, but a second-mention preference for tämä. The results suggest that semantic implicit causality information has an immediate effect on pronoun resolution and its use is not delayed relative to order-of-mention information. Furthermore, they show that order-of-mention differentially affects different types of anaphoric expressions, but semantic information has the same effect.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, 4-55 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, T6G 2E7, Canada. jarvikiv@ualberta.ca.
authors.forename: Juhani
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Järvikivi
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland.
authors.forename: Roger P G
authors.initials: RPG
authors.lastname: van Gompel
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
authors.forename: Jukka
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hyönä
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language
keywords: Comprehension; Finnish; Implicit causality; Pronoun resolution; Visual-world eye-tracking