The Effect Of Accentuation On Pronoun Resolution

Pronoun resolution plays a significant role in language comprehension.As part of the information structure,focus has a great impact on the interpretation of ambiguous pronoun.Phonologically,focus can be modified via the accentuation.In the spoken language comprehension,previous researches have proved that focus realized via accentuation influences the processing of ambiguous pronoun dramatically.However,the previous researches focus on how the accentuation of pronoun affects the resolution of co-reference relation.Few studies have examined how the accentuation of antecedent influences the pronoun resolution.A highly sensitive Visual World Paradigm was adopted in the current study to investigate: 1)How will focus realized through the accentuation of antecedent influence the pronoun resolution in spoken Chinese comprehension? 2)Will the effect of accentuation be modulated by the grammatical role of antecedent? To this end,the experiment manipulated two factors,the accentuation(accentuated vs.non-accentuated)and the grammatical role(subject vs.object).Furthermore,on the one hand,the Visual World Paradigm applied in the present study can provide the participants a relatively natural and real situation during language processing,on the other hand,it can explore the online language processing by recording the eye movement data.The results showed that compared with the non-accentuated ba(control condition),the fixation proportions to the object were higher in the-800 to-600 ms(i.e.before target word onset)time window and the fixation proportions to the subject were higher in the-200 to 200 ms and the 600 to 1000 ms bins in the subject accentuated condition.There were more fixations to the subject in the-800 to 400 ms bins and then more fixations to the object in the 600 to 1000 ms time windows in the object accentuated condition.The fixations to the object were higher in the-600 to 200 ms bins and then the fixations to the subject were slightly higher from 800 ms to 1000 ms in the non-accentuated bei condition.These findings suggest: 1)the accentuation information can be recognized and applied immediately in the pronoun resolution during spoken language comprehension.The anti-focus effect presented at the early stage while focus-effect appeared at the later stage in the subject accentuated condition.Similar pattern was also found in the objectaccentuated condition.2)The effect of accentuation on pronoun resolution is modulated by the grammatical role of the previous mentioned antecedents.The early anti-focus effect in the subject accentuated condition lasted shorter and showed a weaker effect than in the object accentuated condition.Moreover,the focus effect in the subject accentuated condition appeared earlier and lasted longer than in the object accentuated condition.During Chinese-specific passive sentence comprehension,both topic and the order-of-mention significantly affect the pronoun resolution.The topic of the sentence(i.e.the first-mentioned object)is the preferred referent of the ambiguous pronoun.To sum up,the current study indicates that accentuation shows an immediate effect on the pronoun resolution during spoken Chinese comprehension and this effect is modulated by the grammatical role of antecedent.