Syntactic and discourse-level constraints in native and non-native pronoun resolution

尽可能快速、准确地建立代词与先行词之间的指称联系，对句子和语篇的成功理解至关重要。然而，所涉及的心理机制的性质，以及引导先行搜索的约束类型，仍然没有完全理解。语言学和心理语言学模型的回指语解析几乎完全是由成年母语者的数据，绝大多数的在线处理研究调查英语。目前关于代词消解时间进程的假设在处理过程中句法和语篇层面的约束何时起作用以及它们如何随着时间的推移相互作用的问题上存在差异。本项目将调查和比较德语中母语和非母语代词消解过程中句法和语篇层面的约束的时间。目的是检验当前关于实时回指消解的理论模型和假设的跨语言和跨人群有效性。因此，该项目福尔斯XPrag优先方案的核心领域“实用现象模型”，也符合该方案将实用现象调查扩展到非标准人群的目标。本研究采用时程敏感的实验方法--阅读过程中的眼动监测，考察在加工过程中句法和/或语篇层面的信息是否以及何时限制了先行词的搜索。非本族语者在处理过程中对句法信息的敏感性往往降低或延迟，这被预测为导致非本族语者在处理过程中对语篇层面信息的依赖程度高于本族语者。不同人群中句法和语篇层面约束的使用或相对时间的可能差异将使现有代词解析模型的普遍有效性受到质疑，同时为潜在的表征和/或计算系统的模块性提供证据。这个项目的结果将有助于推进我们对实时代词解析背后的心理结构、机制和语言表征的理解。该项目的研究结果将对代词解析的理论语言学方法和当前的处理模型产生影响，也将引起非母语习得领域研究人员的兴趣。

Establishing referential links between pronouns and their antecedents as quickly and as accurately as possible is vital for successful sentence and discourse comprehension. Yet the nature of the mental mechanisms involved, and the types of constraint which guide the antecedent search, are still not fully understood. Both linguistic and psycholinguistic models of anaphor resolution have almost exclusively been informed by data from adult native speakers, and the vast majority of online processing studies have investigated English. Current hypotheses about the time-course of pronoun resolution differ with regard to the questions of when during processing syntactic and discourse-level constraints come into play, and how they interact over time.This project will investigate and compare the timing of syntactic and discourse-level constraints during native and non-native pronoun resolution in German, with the aim of testing the cross-linguistic and cross-population validity of current theoretical models and hypotheses about real-time anaphor resolution. The project thus falls within the XPrag priority programme's core area "models for pragmatic phenomena" and also meets the programme's aim of extending the investigation of pragmatic phenomena to non-standard populations. Data from native and non-native speakers will be compared in order to test the robustness of, and help improve, existing models of anaphor resolution.A time-course sensitive experimental method, eye-movement monitoring during reading, will be used to examine whether and when during processing syntactic and/or discourse-level information constrain the search for an antecedent. Non-native speakers have often shown reduced or delayed sensitivity to syntactic information during processing, which is predicted to lead to a greater reliance on discourse-level information during non-native compared to native anaphor resolution. Possible differences in the use or relative timing of syntactic and discourse-level constraints across different populations would call the universal validity of existing models of pronoun resolution into question, while at the same time providing evidence for the underlying representational and/or computational systems' modularity. The results from this project will help advance our understanding of the mental architecture, mechanisms and linguistic representations that underlie real-time pronoun resolution. Findings from the project will have implications both for theoretical linguistic approaches to pronoun resolution and for current processing models, and will also be of interest to researchers in the field of non-native language acquisition.