MEASURING INHIBITION AND FACILITATION FROM PRONOUNS

Two cross-modal experiments investigated changes in activation levels for pronominal referents and nonreferents. Subjects heard sentences with and without pronouns and responded to visual probe words that appeared at variable intervals during sentence presentation. The gender of potential referents was controlled in Experiment 1 so that the pronoun unambiguously referred to one sentence participant, and Experiment 2 contained both unambiguous and ambiguous reference conditions. In both experiments, responses to probes corresponding to nonreferents were slower in the presence of an unambiguous pronoun compared to the no-pronoun condition, suggesting that pronous inhibit nonreferents. Responses to referents were speeded by unambiguous pronouns compared to the no-pronoun condition in Experiment 2. Neither of these effects appeared at probe positions immediately after the pronoun, indicating that assignment of a referent to an unambiguous pronoun took a measurable amount of time, and a substantially longer amount for an ambiguous pronoun. An additional probe condition in Experiment 1 indicated that these effects were not due to differences in overall processing load. These results were interpreted in light of discourse shifts from establishment of pronominal reference, and in terms of the sensitivity of probe response tasks to a variety of influences. © 1990.