In their experiments, participants viewed pictures on a screen and listened to descriptions in which a pronoun referred to one of the two characters in the picture. ( 2000) using the visual-world paradigm has shown that pronouns can be rapidly interpreted to infer the referent intended by the speaker, especially when gender and number features on the pronoun agree with a single entity in the discourse. Stewart Holler & Kidd 2007 Karimi & Ferreira 2016 for a discussion on other instances of shallow processing, see Ferreira, Bailey & Ferraro 2002). Given the potential complexity of this task and the difficulties of measuring it experimentally, our initial questions only concern timing: How long does it take to resolve reference? And in general, is resolution initiated immediately upon perception of the anaphoric expression? Or do we, often enough, resolve reference only when our practical goals demand it? There is active pursuit of these questions in the literature (see, e.g. 2000 Stewart, Pickering & Sanford 2000 Kehler & Rohde 2013). Much work in psycholinguistics has therefore been directed at the online processing of pronouns and other anaphoric expressions, since its study promises to illuminate the mechanisms by which disparate information sources are integrated in language comprehension ( Ehrlich & Rayner 1983 Blanchard 1987 Arnold et al. Instead, interpreting he also requires consultation of other representations in memory, such as a representation of the discourse in which the pronoun occurs, of the syntax of the local sentence, of the speaker’s interests and intent, and so on. But understanding he requires more than lexical access, since the pronoun itself does not lexically encode concepts like MICKEY MOUSE. To understand this use of the name Mickey Mouse, it might be enough for a listener to access its representation in his or her mental lexicon, as this might be linked to the singular concept MICKEY MOUSE. Mickey Mouse talked to Minnie Mouse before he ate. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary.
When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. Using visual-world eyetracking, we compare the timecourse of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns ( Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked to Minnie before _ eating. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information.
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