Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Eye movement patterns—We now consider the eye movement results in order to look at the fine-grained temporal aspects of participants’ interpretations of pronouns and reflexives in possessed PNPs, and in particular to assess the presence/absence of potentially subtle verb effects in the reflexive conditions. Figures 11a and 11b show the subject-picture advantage (i.e., proportion of looks to picture of subject minus proportion of looks to picture of object) for pronouns and reflexives respectively, plotted over time. A positive subject picture advantage indicates more looks to the picture of the subject than the picture of the object, and
a negative subject picture advantage indicates more looks to the picture of the object than the subject. (The proportion of looks to the picture of the possessor, analyzed separately, is shown in Figure 11c.)
As Figure 11a shows, in the case of pronouns there is not much difference between hear and tell until about 1300ms after the onset of the pronoun, at which point a subject-picture preference emerges in the case of hear (where the subject is the perceiver) and an object-picture preference arises with tell (where the object is the perceiver). In the reflexive conditions, as Figure 11b illustrates, there is no clear difference between the two verbs when it comes to looks to the subject picture and looks to the object picture. In other words, there are no clear verb effects. Figure 11c shows the proportion of looks to the picture of the possessor. Although both pronouns and reflexives initially exhibit a fairly high proportion of looks to the possessor, starting at 400ms after anaphor onset, reflexives ultimately trigger more looks to the picture of the possessor than pronouns, due to a drop in possessor looks in the pronoun conditions.
Statistical analysis of eye movements—In order to analyze the time-course of the eye movement patterns in more detail, we conducted ANOVAs on five 400ms time-slices, starting 200ms before the onset of the anaphor and continuing until 1800ms after the onset. For each time-slice, participant means of the subject picture advantage score (proportion of trials with look to subject picture minus proportion with looks to object picture) were entered into an ANOVA with four factors: Anaphor (pronoun or reflexive), Verb (hear or tell), Order (forward or reverse list) and List (four levels). We conducted these analyses on the subject picture advantage score for both pronouns and reflexives. There are no effects of verb or anaphor type and no anaphor x verb interactions on the subjectpicture advantage scores during the first four time slices (−200 to 200ms, 200 to 600ms, 600 to 1000ms, 1000 to 1400ms: F’s<2.1, p’s>.18). However, during the time slice from 1400ms to 1800ms post-anaphor, we see a significant effect of verb (F(1,8)=6.72, p<.05) as well as a verb-anaphor interaction (F(1,8)=7.4, p<.05), but no significant effect of anaphor (F(1,8)=. 88, p=.38). As Figures 11a-c and further analyses suggest, this effect is driven by the pronoun conditions: Planned comparisons show that with reflexives, there are no significant verb effect in any time slice (F’s<1.4, p’s>.2), whereas with pronouns, a significant verb effect arises
during the last time-slice (F(1,8)=8.31, p<.05), but not during the earlier time slices (F’s<.5, p’s>.5). As Figure 11a illustrates, in the pronoun conditions there is a subject-picture preference with hear (where the subject is the perceiver), whereas with tell we see an object-picture preference (where the object is the perceiver).
ANOVAS were also conducted on the proportion of looks to the picture of the possessor during the same five time slices and with the same factors. These analyses reveal strong effects of anaphor type. This effect does not reach significance during the first two time slices (−200– 200ms: F(1,8)=3.59, p=.095, 200–600ms: F(1,8)=2.6, p=.15), but is significant in the third time slice and persists from there onwards (600–1000ms: F(1,8)=43.54, p<.001, 1000– 1400ms: F(1,8)=72.23, p<.001, 1400–1800ms: F(1,8)=31.55, p=.001). This shows that reflexives are triggering significantly more looks to the picture of the possessor than pronouns, as predicted by Binding Theory.