Reading the words her, his, him: Implications for parsing principles based on frequency and on structure

Two questionnaire studies and two experiments investigated the processing of the pronouns her and him/his. The questionnaires and the first experiment searched for effects of lexical preferences in resolving the temporary syntactic category ambiguity of the word her. Contingent frequency based on a verb's preference for a human vs an inanimate direct object demonstrably affected the final interpretation of an ambiguous her following the verb in an off-line questionnaire study. However, it did not influence on-line processing times for SPEC versus NP uses of her. This result is surprising from the perspective of current lexically based models of ambiguity resolution. Experiment 2 addressed how potential antecedents for the unambiguous pronouns him and his are identified. Both Experiment I and Experiment 2 showed that NP uses of personal pronouns like her and him could be processed more easily than SPEC uses of her and his. Experiment 2 showed that this difference largely reflected differences in difficulty of choosing an antecedent for the pronoun. To account for the processing of her, we proposed that the parser initially builds an underspecified syntactic representation, fixing further details and disambiguating the category of her as subsequent information becomes available. Comprehension proceeds by attempting to find an antecedent for the personal pronoun, with the preferred candidate a syntactically available within-sentence antecedent if one exists. (C) 1997 Academic Press.