Constraints on antecedent integration in sentence comprehension - Event-related potentials and eye movements

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Shravan Vasishth
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 34181293

It is well-established that the process of integrating an anaphor with its antecedent begins immediately after the anaphor is processed, and minimally involves completing the dependency between the antecedent and the anaphor. Although several constraints (such as context, locality, interference and anticipation effects) are known to affect anaphor resolution,the claims in the literature sometimes diverge depending on the method used. For example, Xiang, Dillon, & Phillips (2009) found no interference effects in reflexives in an ERP study, but in an eyetracking study Sturt (2003) did flnd such effects. Missing in the literature is asystemafic invesfigafion of the constraints on anaphor resolution that unifies the flndings fromERP and eyetracking research. In the present project, we close this gap by using both the ERP and eyetracking methods simultaneously to investigate the processing of different types of anaphors (e.g., pronouns, reflexives, elliptical constructions).

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 868: Computational Modelling of Behavioural, Cognitive and Neural Dynamics
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Frank Rösler