The time-course of binding constraints: an eyetracking study

Patrick Sturt
sturt@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
University of Glasgow

Two eyetracking experiments examined the time course of the application of binding constraints during reading. The experiments aimed to determine whether binding constraints constrain the earliest stages of reference processing. The first experiment examined discourses such as the following:

(1)

Jonathan/Jennifer was pretty worried at the City Hospital. He/She remembered that the surgeon had pricked himself/herself with a used syringe needle. There should be an investigation soon.

In terms of binding theory, the reflexive anaphor in the second sentence can only refer to "the surgeon", and not to "Jonathan/Jennifer". Therefore, it is expected that "herself" will be relatively hard to process, because of the mismatch with the stereotypical gender of "surgeon" (stereotypical gender was used to avoid presenting ungrammatical sentences). The relative time-course of binding constraints can be determined by examining the point in processing at which this mismatch effect is found, in relation to any effect of the gender of the previously mentioned character (Jonathon/Jennifer), which is outside the binding domain of the anaphor. The results show a reliable effect of the stereotypical gender of the local noun phrase (surgeon) on the first fixation time on the anaphor, suggesting that the configurational constraints of binding theory are operative at the very earliest stages of reference processing. There was no trace of an influence of the binding-inaccessible noun phrase in the first fixation data, but this did have a marginal effect in the next region, in second pass times.

In order to rule out the possibility that the first fixation effect was due to lexical priming of the anaphor by the recently processed "surgeon", a second experiment was designed in which the linear positions of the first and second mentioned characters were reversed in the second sentence, but where their accessibility with regard to binding theory was kept constant:

(2)

Jonathan/Jennifer was pretty worried at the City Hospital. The surgeon who treated Jonathan/Jennifer had pricked himself/herself with a used syringe needle. There should be an investigation soon.

The experiment again found a first fixation effect of the stereotypical gender of "surgeon" on the anaphor, with no reliable influence of the inaccessible character in this measure. However, unlike in Experiment 1, there was some evidence for the influence of the inaccessible character in gaze duration on the anaphor. This demonstrates that, although binding constraints are operative at the very early stages of the computation of reference relations, they do not necessarily act as a filter on all the later processes, and theoretically inaccessible phrases can be considered at a relatively early stage (see also Badecker & Straub, 2001).