Information structure and pronoun resolution in German and French: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm.
Résumé
The experiments presented here investigated the interplay of language-specific and lan-guage-independent factors influencing within sentence anaphora resolution. Using the visu-al-world paradigm, we looked at interpretation preferences in French and German. We in-vestigated the effects of the information status, as well as of the grammatical role, of the first mentioned referent on pronoun interpretation. The results show that the effects of grammatical role are different in the two languages: There is a clear lasting preference for the object in French but not in German. Explicitly topicalizing or focusing the first referent, however, has similar effects in the two languages: Topicalization leads to more binding of ambiguous pronouns to a potential antecedent than focusing. We argue that this effect is independent of antecedent salience.