Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Delayed verb effects in pronoun conditions—At first glance, and especially in light of participants’ picture choice patterns, it might seem surprising that the verb effect does not reach significance in the pronoun conditions until 1400ms after pronoun onset, and that reflexives and pronouns both start off with a high proportion of looks to the picture of the possessor.
There are at least two possible explanations (perhaps working together) for the initial possessor looks in the pronoun conditions. First, it has been suggested in previous work (Runner et al., 2006) that during the earliest moments of processing, participants temporarily consider the possessor as a potential antecedent for pronouns as well as reflexives. According to this view, the early possessor looks in the pronoun conditions are due to participants temporarily considering the possessor as a potential antecedent, but then abandoning it in favor of the subject or object. However, it is also possible that the early possessor looks stem not from
reference resolution-driven processes but from the visual proximity of the possessor. The possessor character has just been mentioned (…Andrew’s picture of him/himself) and the picture of the possessor is right above the possessor character—i.e., the closest picture to the most-recently-mentioned character. In light of existing work on the effects of proximity on saccades (e.g., Findlay & Brown, 2006), it is not surprising if participants first look at the closest picture.
Crucially, in the pronoun conditions—in stark contrast to the reflexive conditions—the possessor effect is short-lived. The early looks to the possessor decline steeply in the pronoun condition around 400ms after anaphor onset. In the reflexive conditions, in contrast, the looks keep increasing. Thus, regardless of how it is interpreted, the early possessor effect does not conflict with our conclusion that the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives is guided by differently weighted structural and semantic constraints.
In the pronoun conditions, the early possessor looks are replaced by increased looks to the subject picture and the object picture. However, as Figure 11a shows, there is no clear subject/ object preference or perceiver/source preference until a significant perceiver effect emerges 1400ms after anaphor onset. There are at least two possible reasons for why such a delay could occur. If participants are indeed temporarily considering the possessor as a potential antecedent, the temporal delay in looks to the perceiver could be related to the time it takes to abandon a potential antecedent in favor of another. A further factor that might be contributing to the delay is the greater referential and visual complexity of the stimuli in Experiment 3, when compared to the materials used in Experiments 1 and 2. Because Experiment 3 uses possessed PNPs, each sentence contains three referents, rather than just two, and each display contains six objects instead of four. Thus, the items are both semantically and visually more complex than in the first three experiments. In light of existing work showing that the presence of multiple alternatives results in an increase in saccadic response time (e.g. Lee, Keller & Heinen, 2005), it is not altogether unexpected to see a delay in Experiment 3 relative to Experiment 2. As a whole, the results of Experiment 3 support our claim that the referential properties of pronouns and reflexives are guided by differently-weighted structural and semantic constraints, and show that all structural constraints are not weighted equally – a finding which is problematic for accounts that treat structural constraints as a unified class.