Department of Psychological Science, University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jul 29;5:818. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00818. eCollection 2014.
Research suggests that the presence of a non-referent from the same category as the referent interferes with anaphor resolution. In five experiments, the hypothesis that multiple non-referents would produce a cumulative interference effect (i.e., a fan effect) was examined. This hypothesis was supported in Experiments 1A and 1B, with subjects being less accurate and slower to recognize referents (1A) and non-referents (1B) as the number of potential referents increased from two to five. Surprisingly, the number of potential referents led to a decrease in anaphor reading times. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B replicated the probe-recognition results in a completely within-subjects design and ruled out the possibility that a speeded-reading strategy led to the fan-effect findings. The results of Experiment 3 provided evidence that subjects were resolving the anaphors. These results suggest that multiple non-referents do produce a cumulative interference effect; however, additional research is necessary to explore the effect on anaphor reading times.
研究表明，与参照项来自同一范畴的非参照项的存在会干扰回指解析。在五项实验中，检验了多个非参照项会产生累积干扰效应（即扇形效应）的假设。该假设在实验 1A 和 1B 中得到了支持，随着潜在参照项的数量从两个增加到五个，被试在识别参照项（1A）和非参照项（1B）时的准确性和速度都会降低。令人惊讶的是，潜在参照项的数量导致回指阅读时间减少。实验 2A 和 2B 的结果在完全被试内设计中复制了探针识别结果，并排除了快速阅读策略导致扇形效应发现的可能性。实验 3 的结果提供了被试正在解析回指的证据。这些结果表明，多个非参照项确实会产生累积干扰效应；然而，需要进一步的研究来探讨对回指阅读时间的影响。
