Non-antecedent Suppression in American Sign Language

Previous studies have suggested that ASL pronouns may not suppress the activation of non-antecedents during sentence processing. Using a probe recognition task, Experiment 1 investigated whether lack of suppression may be due to the morphological ambiguity of an ASL pronoun when it is unassociated with a spatial locus. Suppression was predicted for unambiguous repeated nouns but not for spatially unassociated pronouns. The results indicated that neither repeated nouns nor ASL pronouns suppressed nonantecedents. The lack of suppression by repeated nouns was surprising and may have been due to the presence of a new discourse participant in the control sentence. Experiment 2 used a before-anaphor baseline condition, and the results indicated that both ASL pronouns and repeated nouns suppressed the activation of non-antecedents. These findings suggest that (1) spatial loci which disambiguate antecedents of ASL pronouns may be similar to gender marking in English with respect to ambiguity resolution and non-an...

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