H. Wind Cowles

Antecedent focus and conceptual distance effects in category noun-phrase anaphora

Previous work has shown that category noun-phrase anaphors (e.g., bird) are read faster when they refer to typical antecedents (e.g., robin) compared to atypical ones (e.g., goose) (Garrod & Sanford, 1977). However, when the antecedent is in a syntactic cleft, there is an inverse effect of typicality (Almor, 1999). We further examined this inverse effect in two self-paced reading time studies. The results of Experiment 1 extend the inverse typicality effect to a more general effect of conceptual distance by showing faster reading times to an anaphor (e.g., vehicle) when its antecedent is clefted and more conceptually distant in a category hierarchy (e.g., hatchback) than when it is closer (e.g., car). Experiment 2 examines whether it is cleft or focus status that causes inverse conceptual distance effects and finds that inverse effects are not confined to cleft constructions, but are also present when the antecedent is in grammatical subject position.

The Influence of Topic Status on Written and Spoken Sentence Production

Four experiments investigate the influence of topic status and givenness on how speakers and writers structure sentences. The results of these experiments show that when a referent is previously given, it is more likely to be produced early in both sentences and word lists, confirming prior work showing that givenness increases the accessibility of given referents. When a referent is previously given and assigned topic status, it is even more likely to be produced early in a sentence, but not in a word list. Thus, there appears to be an early mention advantage for topics that is present in both written and spoken modalities but is specific to sentence production. These results suggest that information-structure constructs, like topic, exert an influence that is not based only on increased accessibility but also reflects mapping to syntactic structure during sentence production.

Between anaphora and deixis...the resolution of the demonstrative noun-phrase ‘that N’

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence completion task and two reading time experiments that used gender to create ambiguous and unambiguous coreference, reveal that the demonstrative NP specifically orients processing toward a less salient referent when there is no gender cue discriminating between different possible referents. These findings show the importance of taking into account the discourse function of the anaphor itself and its influence on the process of searching for the referent.

Conceptual similarity effects on working memory in sentence contexts: testing a theory of anaphora.

The degree of semantic similarity between an anaphoric noun phrase (e.g., the bird) and its antecedent (e.g., a robin) is known to affect the anaphor resolution process, but the mechanisms that underlie this effect are not known. One proposal (Almor, 1999) is that semantic similarity triggers interference effects in working memory and makes two crucial assumptions: First, semantic similarity impairs working memory just as phonological similarity does (e.g., Baddeley, 1992), and, second, this impairment interferes with processes of sentence comprehension. We tested these assumptions in two experiments that compared recall accuracy between phonologically similar, semantically similar, and control words in sentence contexts. Our results do not provide support for Almors claims: Phonological overlap decreased recall accuracy in sentence contexts, but semantic similarity did not. These results shed doubt on the idea that semantic interference in working memory is an underlying mechanism in anaphor resolution.