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Coreference and Antecedent Representation Across Languages

Lago, S; Sloggett, S; Schlueter, Z; Chow, W-Y; Williams, A; Lau, E; Phillips, C; (2017) Coreference and Antecedent Representation Across Languages. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 43 (5) pp. 795-817. 10.1037/xlm0000343. Green open access

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Abstract

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their antecedent noun. In contrast, in languages without syntactic gender such as English, lexical retrieval might be unnecessary. We used eye-tracking while reading to examine whether antecedent retrieval involves rapid semantic and phonological reactivation. We compared German and English. In German, we found early sensitivity to the semantic but not to the phonological features of the pronoun’s antecedent. In English, readers did not immediately show either semantic or phonological effects specific to coreference. We propose that early semantic facilitation arises due to syntactic gender reactivation, and that antecedent retrieval varies cross-linguistically depending on the type of information relevant to the grammar of each language.

Type: Article
Title: Coreference and Antecedent Representation Across Languages
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000343
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000343
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © APA 2017. This article may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1537487
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