Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Results and discussion
Picture choices—As Figure 6 shows, the picture choice results resemble the data from Experiment 2a. With reflexives, there were 6.25% object choices with told and 12.5% object choices with heard. With pronouns, there were 62.5% subject choices with heard and 16.67% subject choices with told. (Although the proportion of subject choices in the tell-pronoun conditions in this experiment (16.67%) may seem low when compared to the proportion observed in Experiment 2a (31.67%), an unpaired t-test reveals that the proportions are not significantly different (t(38)=1.66, p=.1)).
We evaluated the effects of anaphor type (pronoun vs. reflexive) and verb (hear vs. tell) using a mixed-effects regression model in which the dependent variable was the proportion of object responses for pronouns and the proportion of subject responses for reflexives. The analysis was conducted in the same way as the Experiment 2a analysis.
We see a significant main effect of anaphor (β =−2.02, Wald Z =−4.22, p<.001); the subject preference for reflexives is significantly stronger than the object preference for pronouns. This indicates an asymmetrical sensitivity to structural constraints: pronouns trigger more structurally-unexpected picture choices than reflexives. There is also a significant main effect of the verb manipulation (β =1.69, Wald Z = 3.14, p<.01); as in Experiment 2a, hear triggers more subject choices than tell. However, this effect is modulated by hints of a marginal anaphor-verb interaction (β =1.67, Wald Z = 1.74, p=.082), indicating that pronouns are somewhat more sensitive to the verb manipulation than reflexives. In fact, further analyses reveal significant verb effects for pronouns (β =2.47, Wald Z = 4.39, p<.001) but not reflexives (p>.2). So, although pronouns prefer perceivers over sources, the weak numerical preference of reflexives for sources over perceivers is not significant. This confirms the conclusions we drew on the basis of the difference between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2a, namely that a forced-choice task (Experiments 2a, 2b) can make it harder to detect subtle effects that are captured by a picture-verification task (Experiment 1).