Gordon P C, Scearce K A
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 27599-3270, USA.
Mem Cognit. 1995 May;23(3):313-23. doi: 10.3758/bf03197233.
Two self-paced reading-time experiments are reported that examine the time course of pronoun interpretation processes based on local discourse structure and on world knowledge. The characterization of local discourse structure is based on recent work on centering, which provides a specific formulation of how the ways in which sentences make reference to common entities determines the coherence of discourse segments and how discourse structure influences interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. The results of the first experiment show that readers generate a default interpretation of a pronoun based on features of local discourse structure, and that that default interpretation is later confirmed or overridden by knowledge-based processes. The results of the second experiment show that local discourse structure continues to influence pronoun interpretation even when the semantic information that ultimately compels interpretation occurs before the pronoun. These results support the view that processes acting on local discourse structure play a powerful role in guiding language comprehension.
本文报告了两项自定步速阅读时间实验，这些实验基于局部话语结构和世界知识，考察了代词解释过程的时间进程。局部话语结构的刻画基于近期关于中心理论的研究，该理论具体阐述了句子提及共同实体的方式如何决定话语片段的连贯性，以及话语结构如何影响歧义代词的解释。第一个实验的结果表明，读者基于局部话语结构的特征生成代词的默认解释，并且该默认解释随后会被基于知识的过程所确认或推翻。第二个实验的结果表明，即使最终促使解释的语义信息出现在代词之前，局部话语结构仍会继续影响代词解释。这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即作用于局部话语结构的过程在引导语言理解方面发挥着重要作用。
