Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Method
Participants—Sixteen native English speakers from the University of Rochester community participated in this experiment in exchange for $7.50.
Materials—The visual materials for this experiment were similar to those used in Experiment 2b, except that now each display contained three characters and a framed picture of each haracter (see Figure 9). Thus, the level of visual complexity is greater in this experiment since there were six entities in each display, compared with only four in Experiment 2b. As in Experiment 2b, the sound files were recorded using Praat software on a Macintosh computer, and the same female English speaker’s voice was used for all sound files. A total of 16 target items and 104 filler items were constructed. The filler displays, like the target displays, contained three characters as well as three framed pictures.
In the experimental items, participants viewed the displays while hearing sentences containing possessed picture NPs, as in (11). As before, we manipulated verb type (told/heard) and anaphoric form (himself/him). Before the start of the experiment, participants were told that the middle character owns all three pictures shown in the display, and the experiment was preceded by a short training phase to familiarize participants with the task, the characters, and the nature of picture ownership within the experiment. Filler sentences used told and heard and other similar communication verbs, and some fillers contained pronouns and reflexives. Those fillers that used unambiguous full nouns were designed such that the location of the mentioned picture was distributed between left, right and middle. Displays were counterbalanced for position of subject (left/right) and position of source-of-information (left/ right). Half of the items contained three female characters and half contained three male characters. Due to the increased length of the sentences (stemming from the presence of the possessor), the prepositional phrase ‘on the wall’ was not used in Experiment 3. (11) Peter {told/heard from} Andrew about Greg’s picture of {him/himself}. Each participant saw eight target trials with told and eight with heard. Four of the told items appeared with a pronoun and four with a reflexive; similarly, four of the heard items appeared with a pronoun and four with a reflexive. The four presentation lists were also reversed to control for trial order, which created a total of eight presentation lists.
Procedure—The procedure and equipment were the same as for Experiment 2b. Participants listened to pre-recorded sentences while looking at displays presented on a computer monitor, and their task was to click on the picture mentioned in the sentence.
Data analysis—The data analysis methods were the same as for Experiment 2b. The video record was analyzed frame-by-frame (without sound) starting 20 frames before the onset of the pronoun or reflexive and continuing for 80 frames.