Dra. Burdiles-Fernandez, Gina

Eye movements constitute an important cue to understanding how readers connect textual information, particularly when an encapsulator pronoun must be anaphorically resolved in order to construct a coherent mental representation of the text being read. While existing research into anaphoric reference has predominantly focused on the distance between pronouns and referents and on their morphosyntactic features, no previously published studies have addressed the effect in causal contexts of varying extensions of the referent being encapsulated by a neuter pronoun. In the present research, we help fill this gap by studying the effects of online processing of the anaphoric neuter Spanish pronoun ello (‘this’ in English) in causally-related texts using two varying referent extensions: short and long antecedent. A one factor repeated measures design was implemented. The results of three eye reading measures showed a fine-grained picture of encapsulation processes for seventy-two Chilean university students as they each read twelve texts. On the one hand, the reading times for processing the neuter pronoun ello AOI did not show statistically significant differences between the short and long conditions. On the other, the findings indicate that, in constructing referential and relational coherence in causally-related texts in Spanish, resolution of the neuter pronoun is in fact influenced by the extension of the referent.

In discourse comprehension, if all goes well, people tend to create a rich and coherent mental representation of the events described in the text. To do so, referential and relational coherence must be established in order to construct a connected discourse. The objective of this follow-up eye-tracking study (N = 72) is to explore the existence of an interaction effect between two factors: (a) the extension of the referent (short and long antecedent), and (b) the semantic relation (counter-argumentative a pesar de, and causal por), when processing the neuter pronoun ello in texts written in Spanish. No previous study has systematically compared the on-line processing of texts in which different extensions of the encapsulated anaphoric antecedent by the neuter pronoun ello (‘this’ or ‘it’ in English) are presented in diverse marked semantic relations (causal and counter-argumentative). Based on three eye-tracking measures, we found distinctive patterns of reading behavior when anaphoric neuter reference and semantic relations must be processed conjointly in order to construct a coherent mental representation. The main findings show that reading longer and more complex antecedents encapsulated by the neutral pronouns ello exerts more cognitive effort in late processing (Look Back measure), particularly when simultaneously and in the same discourse construction there is an explicitly marked counterargumentative semantic relation. Implications for theories of referential and relational coherence are discussed.