Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Experiments 2a and 2b. Picture choosing and eye-tracking
Even though the results of Experiment 1 shed light on how structural and semantic constraints influence the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture NPs, yes/no answers reflect participants’ final choices and do not tell us about other interpretations participants may have considered before reaching a final choice. In order to learn about what entities participants consider as potential referents for pronouns and reflexives in picture NPs, and how these choices emerge and/or change over time, we use the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm (Cooper, 1974; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995).
In order for eye movements to provide meaningful information about which referents participants are considering as potential antecedents, the visual display presented to participants must include at least two pictures – in this case a picture of the subject and a picture of the object. While such displays can easily be designed, they represent a departure from the picture verification task because the picture-choosing task forces participants to choose between two directly competing interpretations. This differs from the picture verification task, in which participants are asked whether a particular sentence matches a particular display.
Thus, the picture-choosing task asks participants to choose the best interpretation out of two possibilities, whereas the picture verification task asks participants whether a particular interpretation is possible. A priori, we might expect these tasks to generate slightly different results, especially for interpretations that are possible but dispreferred. As a preliminary step towards our aim of using eye-tracking to investigate the on-line processes leading to participants’ final interpretations of pronouns and reflexives in picture NPs, we first conducted an off-line picture choosing experiment to investigate the effects of a design switch
from picture verification to picture choice (Experiment 2a), followed by a visual-world eyetracking study (Experiment 2b).