Using eye-tracking to study anaphoric relations processing in European Portuguese

Abstract

In this study we evaluate processing costs of different types of anaphoric expressionsduring reading. We consider three types of anaphoric expressions in Subject sententialposition: a null pronoun (pro), and two gaps produced by syntactic movement: a WHvariableand a NP copy. Given that coreferential pro exhibits more referential weightthan wh- and NP-gaps, and grounded on theories of referential processing based onrelations of hierarchy and accessibility of the antecedent, we raise the hypothesis that themore dependent on its antecedent the anaphoric null constituent is, and the more minimalis the distance in terms of hierarchical structure between the anaphoric null element andits antecedent, the lower are the cognitive costs in processing. To test our hypothesis, weregistered the eye movements with R6-HS ASL system of 20 Portuguese adult nativespeakers. Text regions including the selected anaphoric expressions were delimited andtagged. We analyzed the reading time of each region taking into account the number andduration of eye fixations per region; we used the reading time by character inmilliseconds in order to compare values between regions of different length. We found asignificant advantage in the reading time of the gaps arising from movement over thereading time of pro.