Effects Of Focus And Topic On Pronoun Resolution

One focus of inquiry in psycholinguistics is pronoun resolution.In Ariel(1988)'s Accessibility Theory,the more accessible an antecedent is,the more likely it is to be retrieved to co-index with the pronoun in the later context.Existing work on English discourse have shown that both topic and contrastive focus can facilitate pronoun resolution(Kaiser,2011).Different from English,which is known as a subjectprominent language,Chinese is topic-prominent and alows the subject before the conjunctive words to be a topic in a bi-clausal sentence.Few works have been conducted on Chinese pronoun resolution in bi-clausal structures,with even fewer on both topic and focus in the same sentential context.Evidence from corpus-based studies(Xu,2003),sentence completion test(Xu,Ni & Chen,2013)and ERPs(Xu,2013;Xu & Zhou,2016)has shown that the topic NP is more accessible than the subject NP,and hence is more likely to be co-indexed with the pronoun.However,the corpus results remain unclear regarding conditional sentences(Chen,2014),and the results are mixed regarding whether a focused NP can facilitate pronoun resolution(Xu,2016;Chen,2016).Focusing on conditional sentences,this study used both off-line production method(i.e.,sentence completion test)and online comprehension method(i.e.,visual world paradigm),to investigate how topic and focus modulate pronoun resolution,by adding stress on the focused NP.It aims to address three research questions: 1)With stressed focus,will the factor of focus show a main effect after introduced by stress? 2)When focus-and topic-marked antecedents occur in the same discourse context,will they compete as candidates of pronoun prior to the disambiguating words? 3)How topic and focus weigh against each other?Sentence completion test aims to investigate whether Chinese speakers show a preference for pronoun to co-refer to its candidate antecedents that are of different information status: a topic-marked NP1 or a focus-marked NP2.We used pairs of names with the same gender,for instance ‘Wang Ling' as NP1 and ‘Jiang Yun' as NP2,manipulating the syntactic position of NP1(before or after connectives,i.e.,a topic or a subject)and the focused status of NP2(focus or non-focus).A logit regression analysis shows a main effect of topic only,but no effect of focus and no interaction.Chinese participants were more likely to interpret the ambiguous pronoun to refer to topicmarked subject NP1.In the visual world eye-tracking experiment,we used paired names with different genders(NP1 ‘Wang Ling',NP2 ‘Zhang Hui'),but the auditory pronoun was ambiguous.We aimed to investigate the time course of pronoun resolution by examining the proportion of looks to the target picture(‘Zhang Hui')and to the competitor picture(‘Wang Ling').Growth curve analysis yielded three findings: First,in the time window of ambiguous words,we found an interaction of focus and topic in participants' fixation to the target picture,and a main effect of topic in participants' fixation to the competitor picture.Second,during the time window of disambiguating words,we found a main effect of topic in participants' fixation to both target picture and competitor picture.Third,unpacking the interactions in ambiguous area showed that participants were more likely to fixate to the competitor picture in the topic/nonfocus condition than the topic/focus condition.Taken together,the results suggest that:(1)Topic can increase the accessibility of antecedents.(2)Topic competes with focus when the two presenting in the same context.(3)Topic exerts a prolonged effect on pronoun resolution.