Oakhill Jane, Garnham Alan, Gernsbacher Morton Ann, Cain Kate
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton East Sussex, U.K.
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, U.K.
Lang Cogn Process. 1992 Aug;7(3-4):257-280. doi: 10.1080/01690969208409387.
This paper reports three experiments on the interpretation of "conceptual" anaphors. These are anaphors that do not have an explicit linguistic antecedent, but one constructed from context. For instance, if one says "I need a knife. Where do you keep ?", means something like "the knives that I presume you have in your house". In the first experiment, subjects rated sentences containing conceptual anaphors, of three different types, to be as natural as ones with a "linguistically correct" antecedent (e.g. "I need an iron. Where do you keep it?"), and as more natural than ones with neither a plausible conceptual antecedent nor a plausible linguistic one. In a second (self-paced) experiment, subjects judged whether the second sentence in such pairs was a sensible continuation from the first, and the time to make these judgements was measured. We found that acceptability judgements were high, and judgement times low, in just those sentences that were rated as more natural in the first experiment. These first two experiments showed that conceptual anaphors are quite easily understood. However, they did not show that such anaphors are processed without difficulty. In the third experiment, we therefore compared conceptual anaphors ("plate … them") with matched plural anaphors whose antecedents were explicit ("some plates … them"). The results were different for different types of anaphor: in one case (pronouns that referred to collective sets), the conceptual version followed by a plural pronoun was easier than the explicit plural version. For the other two types (references to generics and to implied multiple items), the explicit plurals were understood more rapidly than their conceptual counterparts.
本文报告了三项关于“概念性”回指语解释的实验。这些回指语没有明确的语言先行词，而是根据语境构建的。例如，如果有人说“我需要一把刀。你把 放在哪里？”，这里的 意思类似于“我推测你家里有的那些刀”。在第一个实验中，受试者对包含三种不同类型概念性回指语的句子进行评分，认为它们与带有“语言上正确”先行词的句子（例如“我需要一个熨斗。你把它放在哪里？”）一样自然，并且比既没有合理概念先行词也没有合理语言先行词的句子更自然。在第二个（自定步速）实验中，受试者判断此类句子对中的第二个句子是否是第一个句子的合理延续，并测量做出这些判断的时间。我们发现，在第一个实验中被评为更自然的那些句子中，可接受性判断较高，判断时间较短。前两个实验表明，概念性回指语很容易理解。然而，它们并没有表明这种回指语的处理没有困难。因此，在第三个实验中，我们将概念性回指语（“盘子……它们”）与先行词明确的匹配复数回指语（“一些盘子……它们”）进行了比较。不同类型的回指语结果不同：在一种情况下（指代集体集合的代词），后跟复数代词的概念性版本比明确的复数版本更容易理解。对于其他两种类型（指代类属和隐含多个项目），明确的复数形式比其概念对应形式理解得更快。
