Agreement effects of gender and number in pronominal coreference processing in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Abstract:Pronominal coreference is a syntactic dependency in which pronouns are bound to previous referents in discourse. One of the keys to understanding coreference processing is memory, since information that has already been interpreted and stored must be integrated with new material in real time. The aim of this research is to investigate how pronominal antecedents are retrieved from memory, and more precisely to clarify the role of structural constraints, agreement features and decay factors. Since Brazilian Portuguese has rich morphology, speakers of this language can rely on agreement cues as well as structural constraints to resolve coreference. The hypothesis is that candidates that feature-match pronouns will initially influence coreference processing, even though they violate structural constraints, which will only work later in binding processing to help the parser select the most adequate antecedent. An eyetracking experiment was conducted with twenty-four native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The results showed that structurally unacceptable antecedent candidates that feature-matched the pronouns in gender and number facilitated coreference processing. It is claimed that they were considered as potential antecedents. Moreover, it seems that memory might be sensitive to differences that exist between singular and plural features. Plural may be more salient in memory due to the fact it is marked Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, Belo Horizonte, v.25, n.3, p. 1327-1366, 2017 1328 in Brazilian Portuguese. Finally, memory can also be affected by decay factors, which, for example, can be responsible for processing difficulties when there is a long distance between antecedents and pronouns. Keywords: coreference processing; gender and number features; Brazilian Portuguese. Resumo:A correferência é uma dependência sintática em que pronomes são ligados a antecedentes prévios no discurso. Uma das chaves para se compreender o processamento da correferência é a memória, uma vez que as informações que foram anteriormente interpretadas e armazenadas devem ser integradas com novo material em tempo real. O objetivo desta pesquisa é investigar como os pronomes recuperam seus antecedentes na memória, mais precisamente, esclarecer o papel das restrições estruturais, dos traços de concordância e dos fatores de decay. Uma vez que o português brasileiro possui rica morfologia, leitores desta língua podem utilizar-se tanto de traços de concordância, como de restrições estruturais para resolver a correferência. A hipótese era de que candidatos que concordassem com os pronomes em gênero e número poderiam influenciar o início do processamento da correferência, apesar de violarem as restrições estruturais, e estas, por sua vez, somente entrariam em jogo mais tarde para ajudar o processador a selecionar o antecedente mais adequado. Foi realizado um experimento de monitoramento ocular com vinte e quarto falantes nativos de português brasileiro e os resultados apontam que antecedentes estruturalmente inaceitáveis que concor...

The effect of gender agreement mismatches on intersentential anaphoric pronouns

“…Parker et al (2017), however, point out that the cue-based theory of retrieval lacks a clear theory of cues: the account offered by Martin and McElree (2008), for example, is not explicit on how grammatical and interpretive constraints are mapped onto retrieval cues. Although sketched implementations of retrieval cues are many in psycholinguistic theories, we can broadly group them into two: (i) equal combination, in which all cues are combined equally at retrieval, as in other models of memory retrieval (CLARK; GRONLUND, 1996); and (ii) non-uniform mapping, in which only a subset of features is used as retrieval cues (DILLON, 2011;DILLON et al, 2013) or contribute in a weighted cue-combinatorics scheme (PARKER; PHILLIPS, 2014;2017). Given empirical evidence obtained so far, it is very unlikely that all linguistic information is used together with the same weights in retrieval (see PARKER et al, 2017 and references there).…”

“…Leitão, Peixoto & Santos (2008),Alves (2016),Alves (2017) and Alves (2019) also carried out experiments manipulating gender. However, the most crucial manipulations and results are related to Principle B(CHOMSKY 1981), according to which a pronoun may not have its antecedent in a certain syntactic intrasentential domain.…”