Processing spatial anaphora: Referent reactivation with overt and null pronouns in american sign language

Abstract Unlike English, American Sign Language (ASL) permits phonologically null pronouns in tensed clauses. Null pronouns are licensed by morphological marking of “agreeing” verbs which agree with the spatial loci of the subject and object noun phrases of the sentence. We present two probe recognition experiments which investigated whether overt and null pronouns similarly reactivate their referents during on-line sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 revealed faster response times to probes that were referents of either an overt pronoun or a null pronoun compared to control probes, indicating that both overt pronouns and null pronouns associated with verb agreement reactivate their spatial referents. However, response times to non-referent probes were also faster than to control probes, and it was hypothesiscd that an end-of-sentence probe presentation may have tapped into a sentence integration process in which all possible referents were reactivated. In a second experiment, the Same sentences were pre...