Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Experiment 2a. Picture-choosing
Experiment 2a investigates whether the effects of the source/perceiver verb manipulation persist in a context where people need to choose between two directly competing interpretations. If both the structurally-preferred and the structurally-dispreferred interpretation are visually salient, will we still see effects of the semantic constraints? To test this question, we used the same kinds of auditorily-presented sentences as Experiment 1, but instead of being shown a computer display consisting of the two mentioned characters and a
picture of one of the characters, participants saw (on a sheet of paper) a display with two characters and a picture of each character (Fig 3). The task was to select one of the pictures by circling it.
Method
Participants—Twenty-four native English speakers (who did not participate in the other experiments) from the University of Rochester community took part in this experiment. They received $7.50 for their participation.
Materials—The visual stimuli consisted of displays showing two characters and a framed picture of each of the two characters (see Figure 3). There were 20 critical items, and half contained two male characters and half contained two female characters. The characters were the same as in Experiment 1. The auditory stimuli consisted of sentences like the one shown in (9). The sound files were recorded using Praat speech software on an iMac G4. As in Experiment 1, all sentences were spoken with neutral intonation.
(9) Peter {told/heard from} Andrew about the picture of {him/himself} on the wall.
Each participant saw ten target trials with told and ten with heard. Five of the told items appeared with a pronoun and five with a reflexive, and similarly five of the heard items appeared with a pronoun and five with a reflexive. The resulting four presentation lists were reversed to control for trial order, creating a total of eight presentation lists. Overall, half of he items on any given presentation list contained two male referents and half contained two female referents. The pictures were counterbalanced for position of subject (left/right) and position of source-of-information (left/right).
Procedure—Participants listened to pre-recorded sentences while looking at displays that
contained two characters and a picture of each character (see Figure 3). The pictures were printed on 8.5 × 11″ sheets of paper, and participants were instructed to mark (by circling one of the pictures) which of the pictures was mentioned in the sentence. The sound files were played on a Macintosh computer over external speakers. Predictions—The predictions are essentially the same as for Experiment 1, except that now we are not measuring likelihood of yes/no answers but rather choice of subject picture vs. choice of object picture. In light of the results of Experiment 1, we predict that (i) the interpretation of reflexives will be guided by a strong subject constraint, modulated by a relatively weaker source constraint, and that (i) the interpretation of pronouns is guided by two more evenly-matched constraints, i.e., the anti-subject constraint and the perceiver constraint.
In the reflexive conditions, participants are predicted to generally choose the subject picture over the object picture, but to choose the object picture more often with hear than tell. In the pronoun conditions, participants are predicted to show a general object picture preference, which is predicted to be stronger with tell (where the object is the perceiver) than with hear.
The proportion of structurally-unexpected responses is predicted to be higher with pronouns than with reflexives, as in Experiment 1.