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 statu

SUBMITTER: Sauermann A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5524765 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature