Grammatical Role Parallelism Influences Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution in German

Abstract

Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of pronouns in German-speaking adults. Word order of the antecedents and parallelism by the grammatical role of the anaphor was modified in the study. The results show that parallelism of the grammatical role had an early and strong effect on the processing of the pronoun, with subject anaphors being resolved to subject antecedents and object anaphors to object antecedents, regardless of the word order (information status) of the antecedents. Our results demonstrate that personal pronouns may not in general be associated with the subject or topic of a sentence but that their resolution is modulated by additional factors such as the grammatical role. Further studies are required to investigate whether parallelism also affects offline antecedent choices.

The processing of ambiguous object pronoun in L1 and L2 speakers

“…The results of Experiments 1a and 2a indicate that after encountering the object pronoun, L1 and L2 German speakers did not show a rapid use of grammatical role parallelism. L1 participants did not reveal any preferentially looks towards the object antecedent, which is not in agreement with previous studies (e.g., Sauermann, Gagarina 2017, Smyth 1994, Schumacher et al 2016. Whereas L2 participants looked more frequently towards the object antecedent than to the subject antecedent.…”

“…The current study evaluated whether the grammatical role hypothesis (e.g., Smyth 1994) holds for the resolution of the German accusative object pronoun ihn 'him'. Previous studies showed an impact of grammatical role parallelism on subject pronoun resolution (e.g., Sauermann, Gagarina 2017, Schumacher et al 2016. The results of Experiments 1a and 2a indicate that after encountering the object pronoun, L1 and L2 German speakers did not show a rapid use of grammatical role parallelism.…”

“…In sentences with a non-canonical word order, the resolution mechanisms are likely submitted to additional processing factors. As in general, studies on German have mainly examined the resolution of subject pronouns following canonical sentences (e.g., Sauermann & Gagarina 2017;Schumacher et al 2016). So far, less is known concerning the resolution of object anaphora, as for instance, the masculine accusative personal pronoun ihn, which can refer to either 'postman' or 'sailor', in non-canonical word order sentences.…”

Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study

“…The influence of subject-hood and order-of-mention on pronoun interpretation are only tendencies, and other things can influence pronoun interpretation such that the grammatical subject / first referent is not the preferred antecedent. For instance, when the pronoun is an accusative pronoun (e.g., him or her), grammatical objects are preferred as antecedents (Chambers & Smyth, 1998;Sauermann & Gagarina, 2017). The previously mentioned effects are all structural, that is, they involve the structure of sentences in one way or another.…”

The timing of prominence information during the resolution of German personal and demonstrative pronouns

“…Importantly, in Schumacher's approach, the relevance of thematic role for pronoun resolution does not completely rule out the contribution of other factors such as grammatical role. Indeed, grammatical role may be an important factor when the grammatical role of the pronoun is also considered, where grammatical role parallelism may exert an influence (Sauermann & Gagarina, 2017). Rather, it is proposed that these factors form prominence hierarchies which interact to determine the appropriate referent.…”