Peters Sara A, Boiteau Timothy W, Almor Amit
Social and Behavioral Sciences Department, Newberry CollegeNewberry, SC, USA; Department of Psychology, University of South CarolinaColumbia, SC, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina Columbia, SC, USA.
Front Psychol. 2016 Mar 1;7:214. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00214. eCollection 2016.
The choice and processing of referential expressions depend on the referents' status within the discourse, such that pronouns are generally preferred over full repetitive references when the referent is salient. Here we report two visual-world experiments showing that: (1) in spoken language comprehension, this preference is reflected in delayed fixations to referents mentioned after repeated definite references compared with after pronouns; (2) repeated references are processed differently than new references; (3) long-term semantic memory representations affect the processing of pronouns and repeated names differently. Overall, these results support the role of semantic discourse representation in referential processing and reveal important details about how pronouns and full repeated references are processed in the context of these representations. The results suggest the need for modifications to current theoretical accounts of reference processing such as Discourse Prominence Theory and the Informational Load Hypothesis.
指称表达的选择和处理取决于所指对象在语篇中的地位，因此当所指对象显著时，代词通常比完全重复的指称更受青睐。在此，我们报告两项视觉世界实验，结果表明：（1）在口语理解中，与代词之后提到的所指对象相比，重复的限定指称之后提到的所指对象会出现注视延迟，这反映了上述偏好；（2）重复指称与新指称的处理方式不同；（3）长期语义记忆表征对代词和重复名字的处理产生不同影响。总体而言，这些结果支持了语义语篇表征在指称处理中的作用，并揭示了在这些表征背景下代词和完全重复指称如何被处理的重要细节。结果表明有必要对当前指称处理的理论解释进行修正，如语篇突出理论和信息负荷假说。
