Readers' sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: How salience influences anaphor resolution

• Published in: Memory & cognition 2004-04, Vol.32 (3), p.511-522
• Main Authors: KLIN, Celia M, WEINGARTNER, Kristin M, GUZMAN, Alexandria E, LEVINE, William H
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cues; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Hypotheses; Language; Linguistics; Memory; Narration; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Recognition (Psychology); Vocabulary
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03195843

Despite the general assumption that anaphoric inferences are necessary inferences, Levine, Guzmán, and Klin (2000) concluded that the probability of resolving noun phrase anaphors depends both on the degree of accessibility in memory of the antecedent concepts and the extent to which resolution is necessary to create a coherent discourse representation. Four experiments are presented in which the factors that influence readers' standard of coherence are investigated. We examine the hypothesis that readers are more likely to resolve anaphors that are perceived as salient; salience was manipulated both with a syntactic focusing structure (wh- clefts) and with the addition of prenominal adjectival modifiers. The results of a probe recognition time task provide support for the hypothesis that a variety of linguistic cues serve as mental processing instructions (Givón, 1992), which instruct readers as to how much attention to devote to processing.