Abstract: 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.
Publication Type
- Article