Theme: Semantics and Structural types of pronoun. Plan

Procedure—Participants listened to pre-recorded sentences while looking at displays on a computer screen. The participants’ task was to indicate whether or not the sentence they heard matched the visual display, by pressing ‘y’ or ‘n’ on the computer keyboard. The displays were presented on an eMac G4 using Psyscope (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt & Provost, 1993), which was also used to record participants’ responses. The sound files were played over external speakers.
Predictions—If structural constraints (the subject constraint for reflexives and the antisubject constraint for pronouns) fully determine reference resolution, differences in verb semantics should not lead to differences in anaphor resolution in picture NPs. Thus, the preferred antecedents for pronouns and reflexives should remain the same regardless of whether the sentence contains hear or tell. However, if semantic constraints modulate the effects of structural constraints for both pronouns and reflexives, as predicted by the source and perceiver hypotheses ((4) and (6)), a main effect of the verb manipulation is predicted. Reflexives are predicted to result in more structurally-dispreferred object choices with her (object=source) than with tell, and pronouns are predicted to result in more structurally dispreferred subject choices with hear (subject=perceiver) than with tell. In other words, whereas the structural and semantic constraints converge in the tell conditions, they conflict in the hear conditions.
Crucially, the magnitude of the verb effect depends on the relative weights of the structural and semantic constraints. If the weights of structural and semantic constraints (whatever these relative weights turn out to be) are the same for pronouns as they are for reflexives, the prediction is that the magnitude of the verb effect will be the same for reflexives and pronouns.
In other words, the proportion of subject and object choices in the reflexive conditions will be paralleled by the proportion of object and subject choices triggered in the pronoun condition:
Whatever levels of sensitivity reflexives show to structural and to semantic information, pronouns are predicted to show the same levels.
However, if the form-specific multiple-constraints approach applies in the within-clause domain, the syntactic and semantic constraints might not be weighted equally for pronouns and reflexives. If the weightings for these two forms are different, one form could be subject to a powerful syntactic constraint and a weaker semantic constraint (or vice versa), whereas for the other form, the weights of the constraints might be the same or perhaps reverse. do not have specific hypotheses regarding the directions of these effects, but want to emphasize that the form-specific approach allows for a situation in which the effects for pronouns and
reflexives are asymmetrical, contrary to the ‘equally weighted’ approach sketched above.