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Antecedent Frequency Effects on Anaphoric Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from Spanish

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Abstract

High-frequency words are usually understood and produced faster than low-frequency words. Although the effect of word frequency is a reliable phenomenon in many domains of language processing, it remains unclear whether and how frequency affects pronominal anaphoric resolution. We evaluated this issue by means of two self-paced reading experiments. Native speakers of Spanish read sentences containing the anaphoric noun or pronoun at the subject syntactic position (Experiment 1) or at the object syntactic position (Experiment 2) while the antecedent of the anaphor was either a high-frequency or a low-frequency word. Results showed that nominal anaphors were read faster when referring to high-frequency than to low-frequency antecedents, and faster when referring to subjects than to objects. Critically, pronoun reading times were unaffected by the frequency and by the syntactic position of the antecedent. These results are congruent with theories assuming that syntactic information of the words is not frequency sensitive.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2010-20472), Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-31360), Department of Education, Universities and Research, Basque Government (IT665-13), Basque Government and University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU to Egusquiza (BFI-2012-219, EHUA13/39) and EC FP7/SSH-2013-1 AThEME (613465) to Zawiszewski. We are also grateful to Mikel Santesteban and Kepa Erdocia for their valuable help during data analysis as well as for their comments on the previous versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Unibertsitateko Ibilbidea 5, 01006, Vitoria, Spain

    Nerea Egusquiza & Adam Zawiszewski

  2. Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy

    Eduardo Navarrete

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  1. Nerea Egusquiza
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  2. Eduardo Navarrete
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  3. Adam Zawiszewski
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Correspondence to Adam Zawiszewski.

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Egusquiza, N., Navarrete, E. & Zawiszewski, A. Antecedent Frequency Effects on Anaphoric Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from Spanish. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 71–84 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9325-3

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