Do you know who that is? Representational detail affects discourse focus and anaphor resolution

Establishing referential relations among text elements is critical to establishing discourse coherence. Although resolution of coreference between anaphors and their antecedents is central to many theories of text processing, most address the semantic features of antecedent entities in a minimal way (e.g., via morphological features such as gender and number). However, research shows that semantically rich entities are represented in a different manner than semantically empty ones (e.g., Bill Clinton versus Bill Smith), and that such differences have processing consequences in a variety of cognitive tasks. In two experiments, we investigated how the semantic features of discourse referents affected coreferential processing. Our results indicate that increasing the semantic detail associated with the characters in our experimental sentences increased their psychological prominence in the discourse representation. In Experiment 1, semantic detail increased the relative availability of antecedent entities in memory when they were uniquely identifiable by an anaphoric expression. In Experiment 2, semantic detail also affected the online resolution and integration of anaphor – antecedent relations: semantically rich antecedents that were not otherwise focused in the discourse reliably elicited the repeated-name penalty, an effect known to reflect discourse prominence. In addition, semantic detail seemed to permit recovery from lingering effects of the repeated-name penalty. Our results are consistent with recent evidence that the quality of discourse information affects the construction of a coherent representation, even when it is incidental to structural and referential relations in a text. Models of text processing must incorporate a role for this kind of representational information.

The repeated name penalty effect in children’s natural reading: Evidence from eye tracking

We report data from an eye tracking experiment on the repeated name penalty effect in 9-year-old children and young adults. The repeated name penalty effect is informative for the study of children’s reading because it allows conclusions about children’s ability to direct attention to discourse-level processing cues during reading. We presented children and adults simple three-sentence stories with a single referent, which was referred to by an anaphor—either a pronoun or a repeated name—downstream in the text. The anaphor was either near or far from the antecedent. We found a repeated name penalty effect in early processing for children as well as adults, suggesting that beginning readers are already susceptible to discourse-level expectations of anaphora during reading. Furthermore, children’s reading was more influenced by the distance of anaphor and antecedent than adults’, which we attribute to differences in reading fluency and the resulting cognitive load during reading.

Age of Arrival (AOA) effects on anaphor processing by Japanese bilinguals

This study investigates the role of exposure to English on discourse-reference processing by native Japanese speakers. Shoji et al. (2016a, The repeated name penalty, the overt pronoun penalty, and topic in Japanese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007 %2Fs10936-016-9424-4) found that Japanese-English bilinguals residing in the United States show a Repeated Name Penalty (RNP; Gordon et al. 1993. Pronouns, names, and the centering of attention in discourse. Cognitive Science 17. 311–347) and an Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP; Gelormini-Lezama and Almor 2011, Repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in Spanish. Language Cognitive Processes 26. 437–454) in Japanese with both topic (wa-marked) subject anaphors and non-topic (ga-marked) subject anaphors, indicating that the different morphological markings on anaphors do not alter these effects. In contrast, more recent data collected from L1-immersed Japanese speakers residing in Japan (Shoji et al. 2016b, The repeated name penalty and the overt pronoun penalty in Japanese. Unpublished manuscript) show that these speakers do not show a RNP or an OPP for topic-marked anaphors. Here we report a reanalysis of Shoji et al.’s (2016a) results showing that these effects are moderated by participants’ Age of Arrival (AOA; i. e. the age at which participants first arrived to the place where their second language is regularly spoken). Participants with an early AOA showed differential processing patterns for topic-marked anaphors and non-topic anaphors, while participants with late AOA did not. We propose as an explanation that early AOA bilinguals represent different languages separately, while late AOA bilinguals tend to rely on a single unified language system.