Study 2: Interpretation (Anaphora resolution task)

The interpretation data were obtained using an experimentally based method, which was an off-line, self-paced listening task in the form of an oral comprehension questionnaire, modified from Mastropavlou, Katsiperi, Fotiadou, Fleva, Peristeri, Tsimpli (2014) on Greek monolingual adults. Their study was an online self-paced listening and picture-matching task, which took into account the PAH (Carminati 2002) and, additionally, the role of definiteness in AR (see §4.1.1.1). The main differences between the original study and the present one, in methodological terms, have to do with the particular characteristics of the bilingual population which participated in this study and are the following:

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(a) In the present study, the task was not picture-matching as in the original study. The participants only listened to recorded sentences and then answered orally a comprehension question (included in the recording) for each sentence. The decision to exclude the pictures was partly based on the fact that the definiteness was manipulated in the object antecedent. Picture stimuli could affect participants’ antecedent choices, since the image of a definite and an indefinite object antecedent (e.g. ‘the nurse/a nurse’) was exactly the same. Moreover, despite the task being untimed, it was crucial that the participants would answer the question immediately after listening to each recording. Displaying pictures would possibly complicate more the process of responding. Visual stimuli do provide memory cues, but may confuse participants causing an additional processing cost in deciphering them. This point is particularly relevant in cases of elderly participants, a fair amount of which participated in this study. Therefore, in order to avoid visual errors and possibly random answers, no use of pictures was made for this task. It was also considered that hearing and interpreting oral speech is a natural and habitual process of daily life, which does not necessarily demand visual cues.

(b) The AR task did not offer options of possible answers/antecedents for the participants to choose, contrary to the original study, in which three potential referents were displayed in images (subject, object, ‘other’). Instead, the participants were instructed to answer orally to the comprehension question giving their first intuition. The first data were collected in Greece and were initially used on a pilot basis, which was finally included in the main study with no modifications. In the initial data collection stage, none of the participants ever responded that the agent of the verb in question was a third referent (absent from the linguistic context). The experimental items with the respective questions, therefore, led the listeners to select one of the antecedents comprised in the matrix clause. Additionally, in Mastropavlou et al. (2014) the percentages of preference for the ‘other’ alternative were very low. Thus, no different options and no ‘other’ referent were given to the participants, since these would not be particularly beneficial to the realisation of the task.

(c) Manipulation of the matrix subject definiteness was not included in the present study because constructions with indefinite subjects are considered to be relatively infrequent according to general principles of given-before-new ordering of

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information within sentences. Moreover, indefinite subjects are generally used for newly introduced referents. In the production study, such presentational/existential sentences were excluded from the main analysis, since the focus was on TC and TS contexts, which involve referents’ maintenance and reintroduction. Thus, only experimental items with definite subjects in the matrix clause were considered. (d) The length of the oral questionnaire was shorter than the one used in the original study. This decision was taken considering the fact that it is easy for the participants to get tired of answering lengthy questionnaires, especially in a language which is not dominant for them. In particular, in interpreting ambiguous anaphora structures, if the process takes too long for them, it may happen that they start giving random answers in order to finish as soon as possible. It was, thus, regarded convenient to reduce the size of the questionnaire so that the participants could stay focused, thereby securing the best possible reliability in their responses.

(e) The interpretation task was an offline rather than an online test, in the sense that the participants’ reaction times were not recorded. This is because of the wide age range of speakers taking part in the study (16-87), with a number of them being elderly. It was thus deemed that measuring reaction times would be ineffective since the older participants would evidently show a slower processing speed than the younger ones. Moreover, this would possibly not reflect actual reaction times but rather speed of hand movements, irrelevant to the present research. The possibility of computer use on the part of the participants was also rejected since some older people dislike or feel intimidated by computers due to unfamiliarity. Therefore, the task focused only on the participants’ antecedent preferences in resolving null and overt pronouns in ambiguous anaphora structures elicited through their oral responses, with no measure of reading or reaction times.

The AR task tested interpretation of non-biased referentially ambiguous intra- sentential forward anaphora, involving biclausal discourse contexts. Forward anaphora is generally preferred to backward anaphora (cataphora), thereby being more frequent across languages as the ‘unmarked’ word order (Blackwell 2003; Iraola 2015). The test sentences presented a sequence of two events in a subordinating discourse structure. There were two third-person singular referents in a matrix clause

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in the canonical word order (SVO), a subject and an object, matched in gender. The matrix clause was followed by an adverbial (temporal) clause consisting of either a NS or an unstressed OSP matched in gender and number with the two matrix antecedents. In the NS condition, an adverb was placed in the position of the subject to maintain the same number of segments across conditions. Half of the test sentences included feminine referents and the other half masculine referents. The verb of the embedded clause was always in past imperfect. Two variables were manipulated: the anaphoric subject in the embedded clause and also the definiteness of the object in the matrix clause. The constructions were fully ambiguous because the referents in the matrix clause were equally prominent and antecedent of the embedded pronoun could either refer to the subject or the object of the matrix clause. An example of an experimental item is (37), in which the matrix object is indefinite and the embedded subject is OSP. All the experimental sentences and the filler items are displayed in Appendix D.

(37) a. O ðiefthindis xeretuse enan jatro otan aftos evjene apo to asanser. Pjos evjene apo to asanser?

b. El director saludaba a un doctor cuando él salía del ascensor. ¿Quién salía del ascensor?

‘The director was greeting a doctor when he was exiting the lift. Who was exiting from the lift?’

The conditions thus were four, with the matrix subject being definite in all cases: (i) Definite matrix object - Null embedded subject (DDN)

(ii) Indefinite matrix object - Null embedded subject (DIN) (iii) Definite matrix object - Overt embedded subject (DDO) (iv) Indefinite matrix object - Overt embedded subject (DIO)

The test sentences were 16 (8 with a NS, 8 with an OSP) and were presented in a randomised order, with 1:1 ratio to the fillers and two practice items at the beginning of the task (see Appendix D). Equivalent versions of the oral questionnaire in Greek and Spanish were created. The Spanish version was used for the Spanish monolinguals only. The experimental sentences and questions were recorded by a

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male native speaker of Greek and Chilean Spanish respectively, who produced the items naturally with clear voice and flattened prosody (neutral intonation). The recorded sentences were saved in a tablet (Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1) and were presented auditorily to the speakers requesting them to use earphones (their own or provided by me).

In order to reduce metalinguistic awareness, the participants were prompted to answer as quickly as they could. After listening to each item, the participants had to answer orally who was the doer of the action of second clause. Given that the referents in the matrix clause were of the same gender (masculine or feminine), the participants had to choose between two competing antecedents in subject or object position. In exceptional cases, they could listen to an item for a second time. The participants were recorded and an entry of their responses was made in written form. Subsequently, the data were verified and inserted into a database in Excel.

Contrary to the production task, which involved contextualised discourse units expressed by the participants, the interpretation task concerned decontextualised discourse units presented to the participants. The experimental sentences were considered to be completely ambiguous without providing any cues (e.g. world knowledge, grammatical cues) that could help to resolve NS or OSP, thus the pronouns could not be identified through any mechanisms other than the use of the anaphor in the particular narrow linguistic context in which it appeared.

As seen in §2.4.3, listeners deal with ambiguity by having preferences as captured by the PAH (Carminati 2002). Subjects are frequently omitted in non-contrastive non- emphatic contexts since referents can be usually recovered directly from verbal morphology. Thus, subject omission occurs mostly in TC contexts. Change of referent (TS) is typically realised by an overt subject, which is LS in referent introduction and OSP or LS in referent reintroduction. In interpreting ambiguous anaphora in the present study, NS and OSP involved referent continuity or reintroduction. The ambiguity of the sentences served to determine whether pronouns have clearly identifiable biases. The purpose of the task was to find to what extent the PAH is

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operative in non-biased ambiguous intra-sentential contexts in Greek and in Spanish as well as in Greek in contact with Spanish, using the same methodology.

Narratives allow a fine-grained exploration of the contextual factors regulating AR. The experimental design of the interpretation task provided a testing ground for the PAH in isolated sentences, which lack context and are thus expected to guide the participants to spontaneously apply (or not) referential biases. However, two points should be taken into account regarding production and interpretation respectively: (a) Oral production may be affected by performance limitations, such as articulatory or memory constrains, resulting in unintentional speech errors which do not truly reflect speakers’ competence. This is why aural interpretation is important in providing a means of better assessing linguistic knowledge (see Rothman 2007b). (b) In resolving ambiguous anaphora, in lack of context the listeners may silently fill in contexts in the otherwise decontextualised sentences. As Altmann and Kamide (2007: 502) state, ‘sentence comprehension is not a passive process that projects an articulated world onto some inner mental screen. Instead, it is a process that results in active behaviours directed towards the contents of the concurrent world’. The participants may invent a context in their mind and this extralinguistic information ultimately affects their preferred interpretation in resolving ambiguous reference. Another point to consider, as noted in literature, is that experimental research on AR has foremost considered PAH-like contexts, which constitute only ‘one narrow instance of the numerous and complex set of discourse structure variables that could influence pronominal reference’ (Jegerski et al. 2011: 503). On this ground, use of subjects in narratives may illuminate AR from different angles regarding expression (and thus expected interpretation) of particular referential forms.

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