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The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a grant from The Academy of Finland (Grant No. 106418) awarded to the first author and a grant from the Leverhulme Trust (F/00143E) to the second author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, 4-55 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, T6G 2E7, Canada

    Juhani Järvikivi

  2. School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland

    Roger P. G. van Gompel

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Jukka Hyönä

Authors
  1. Juhani Järvikivi
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  2. Roger P. G. van Gompel
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  3. Jukka Hyönä
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Correspondence to Juhani Järvikivi.

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Järvikivi, J., van Gompel, R.P.G. & Hyönä, J. The Interplay of Implicit Causality, Structural Heuristics, and Anaphor Type in Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 525–550 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9451-1

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