Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Experiment 1: Picture verification
Method
Participants—Twenty-four native English speakers from the University of Rochester community participated in this experiment in exchange for $7.50.
Materials—The visual stimuli consisted of displays depicting two characters and a framed picture of one of the characters (see Figure 1). The images were generated from a large epository of purchased clip-art images and were arranged and edited using Adobe Photoshop.
There were five male and five female characters. Before the start of the experiment, participants were familiarized with the names of the characters. The sound files that participants heard while viewing the visual displays were recorded using Praat speech software (Boersma & Weenink, Institute of Phonetics Sciences, University of Amsterdam) on an iMac G4 computer. The same female English speaker’s voice was used for all sound files, and the sentences were spoken with neutral intonation. A total of 32 target items (display-sentence pairs) and 32 filler items were constructed. The target displays always contained two characters, one on each side of the display, and a framed picture of one of the pictured characters in the middle (see Figure 1). The filler displays also had two caracters and a picture in the same positions as the targets, but the picture depicted a third character. While viewing the displays, participants heard sentences with picture NPs without possessors, as shown in (8). For the target items, we crossed verb type (told/heard), anaphoric form (himself/him), and visual display (picture of subject/picture of object) to create eight conditions. Filler sentences had the same structure and used the same verbs, but contained no pronouns or reflexives. (8) Peter {told/heard from} Andrew about the picture of {him/himself} on the wall.
With told, the subject of the sentence is the source of information and the object is the perceiver, whereas with heard, this pattern is reversed. Eight presentation lists were constructed by combining the 32 target items with the 32 filler items. Within a presentation list, a participant saw 16 target trials with told and 16 with heard. Eight of the told items appeared with a pronoun and eight with a reflexive. Similarly, eight of the heard items apeared with a pronoun and eight with a reflexive. Half of the pronoun items were paired with a display showing a picture of the object of the sentence and half were paired with a display showing the picture of the subject. The same was done for the reflexives.
This resulted in eight presentation lists in total. Overall, half of the 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 the source-ofinformation (left/right).