The Eyelands Lab (directed by Prof. Dave Kush) at UofT Scarborough has published its first eyetracking paper, entitled “Principle B is an early, predictive filter on active cataphor resolution: Eye-tracking evidence”, in Memory & Cognition. The Eyelands Lab is dedicated to understanding what knowledge humans have about their languages and how they put that knowledge to use in real-time language processing. It in the Department of Language Studies at UTSC and formerly at the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
The abstract of the paper is provided below:
Pronouns that precede their antecedents are called cataphors. Upon encountering a cataphor, comprehenders engage in an active, eager search for its antecedent later in the sentence. The processing of cataphoric dependencies has been used to probe comprehenders’ incremental expectations and how grammatical knowledge guides those expectations. Past experiments have investigated whether knowledge of Binding Principles B and C constrains comprehenders’ initial expectations for coreference or whether grammatical knowledge applies with a delay. Although studies suggest that the Binding Principles B and C influence the earliest stages of cataphor resolution, recent findings have called into question whether the main experimental paradigm used to test the time-course of constraint-sensitivity self-paced reading – has the necessary temporal precision to adjudicate between competing accounts. In this paper, we investigate the application of Principle B during cataphor processing using eye tracking-while-reading, an experimental paradigm with more fine-grained temporal sensitivity. Our results converge with prior findings that Principle B strongly constrains active cataphor resolution. We end by discussing how to model Principle B sensitivity via predictions made at the level of the discourse representation.