Does the frequency of the antecedent noun affect the resolution of pronominal anaphors? An ERP study

Neuroscience Letters
Angela HeineArthur M Jacobs

Abstract

Behavioral studies investigating the influence of the relative word frequency of antecedent nouns on the processing of anaphoric pronouns have yielded contradictory results. While some researchers found no effect of an antecedent's frequency of occurrence on coreference resolution [J. Simner, R. Smyth, Phonological activation in anaphoric lexical access (ALA), Brain Lang. 68 (1999) 40-45], others report shorter reading times for pronouns referring to low compared to high frequency nouns [R.G.P. van Gompel, A. Majid, Antecedent frequency effects during the processing of pronouns, Cognition 90 (2004) 255-264]. Using event-related potentials, our study aimed to further investigate the issue. Participants were presented with sentence pairs, of which the first contained either a high frequency, a middle frequency or a low frequency noun. The second sentence contained a pronoun which referred back to the noun in the first sentence. ERP waves were determined, time-locked to both the nouns and the anaphoric pronouns. We observed a graded N400 effect for antecedents of the three frequency classes with amplitudes reversely related to the word's lexical frequency. Coreferential pronouns elicited a P300, with amplitudes dependent on the no...Continue Reading

References

May 1, 1995·Psychophysiology·D J ChwillaP Hagoort
May 1, 1997·Memory & Cognition·L OsterhoutJ McLaughlin
Aug 6, 1999·Brain and Language·J Simner, R Smyth
Dec 9, 2000·Brain and Language·T HarrisP Holcomb
Mar 26, 2002·Neuroscience Letters·Marcel C M BastiaansenPeter Hagoort
Dec 12, 2003·Cognition·Roger P G van Gompel, Asifa Majid
Jun 29, 2004·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research·Judith StrebFrank Rösler
Aug 2, 2005·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Peter Hagoort

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Citations

Oct 11, 2014·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research·Nerea EgusquizaAdam Zawiszewski
Aug 4, 2015·Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior·Lars MeyerAngela D Friederici
Aug 28, 2016·Psychophysiology·Xiaodong Xu, Xiaolin Zhou
Dec 21, 2006·Neuroreport·Angela HeineArthur M Jacobs

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