title: Sensitivity to Crossover Constraints During Native and Non-native Pronoun Resolution.
abstract: We report the results from two experiments examining native and non-native German speakers' sensitivity to crossover constraints on pronoun resolution. Our critical stimuli sentences contained personal pronouns in either strong (SCO) or weak crossover (WCO) configurations. Using eye-movement monitoring during reading and a gender-mismatch paradigm, Experiment 1 investigated whether a fronted wh-phrase would be considered as a potential antecedent for a pronoun intervening between the wh-phrase and its canonical position. Both native and non-native readers initially attempted coreference in WCO but not in SCO configurations, as evidenced by early gender-mismatch effects in our WCO conditions. Experiment 2 was an offline antecedent judgement task whose results mirrored the SCO/WCO asymmetry observed in our reading-time data. Taken together, our results show that the SCO constraint immediately restricts pronoun interpretation in both native and non-native comprehension, and further suggest that SCO and WCO constraints derive from different sources.
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, 14476, Potsdam, Germany. felser@uni-potsdam.de.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9424-0950
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Felser
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24-25, 14476, Potsdam, Germany.
authors.forename: Janna-Deborah
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Drummer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Eye-movement monitoring; German; Pronoun resolution; Strong crossover; Weak crossover