What Can Eye Movements Tell Us about Higher Level Comprehension?

The majority of eye tracking studies in reading are on issues dealing with word level or sentence level comprehension. By comparison, relatively few eye tracking studies of reading examine questions related to higher level comprehension in processing of longer texts. We present data from an eye tracking study of anaphor resolution in order to examine specific issues related to this discourse phenomenon and to raise more general methodological and theoretical issues in eye tracking studies of discourse processing. This includes matters related to the design of materials as well as the interpretation of measures with regard to underlying comprehension processes. In addition, we provide several examples from eye tracking studies of discourse to demonstrate the kinds of questions that may be addressed with this methodology, particularly with respect to the temporality of processing in higher level comprehension and how such questions correspond to recent theoretical arguments in the field.

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.

An ERP study of anaphor resolution with focused and non-focused antecedents

The goal of this study is to better understand when (and why) the combination of semantic overlap between antecedent and anaphor and antecedent focus leads to difficulty in anaphor processing. To investigate these questions, three ERP experiments manipulating semantic overlap and focus compared the ERPs from the onset of the anaphor as well as from the onset of the last word in the sentence containing the anaphor. Our results suggest that although the focus status of an antecedent and the semantic overlap between the antecedent and anaphor are important, these factors are not the only significant contributors to online anaphor resolution. Factors such as readers’ expectations about thematic shifts also influence the processing. We consider our results in relation to two accounts of anaphor resolution, the Informational Load Hypothesis (Almor, 1999; Almor & Eimas, 2008) and JANUS (Garnham & Cowles, 2008).

The role of cognitive control in anaphor resolution in children with specific language impairment

ABSTRACTWe studied anaphor resolution and its relationship with cognitive control abilities in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children. In a sentence–picture verification task assessing anaphor interpretation, the SLI group was less successful than age-matched TD peers, and displayed similar performance patterns as younger TD children in previous studies. The SLI group showed weaknesses in nonlinguistic cognitive control tasks, which were associated with anaphor interpretation results. These findings are in contrast with the view that proposes a grammar-specific deficit behind anaphor resolution problems in SLI. We suggest that anaphor interpretation in this population is delayed but not atypical, and this delay can be partly explained by weaker cognitive control abilities.