Adults' on-line comprehension of object pronouns in discourse

A well-known finding in the literature on language acquisition is that English-speaking children as old as 6 frequently misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the local referential subject. However, the percentage of errors with respect to this so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) varies substantially across studies. Conroy, Takahashi, Lidz and Phillips (2009) showed that in English the DPBE disappears when an elaborate context is presented in which the correct referent and the correct sentence interpretation are made accessible. They conclude from this that English-speaking children possess knowledge of Principle B but are hindered by a discourse context in which the potential referents and interpretations are not appropriately balanced. A similar disappearance of the DPBE was shown for Dutch by Spenader, Smits and Hendriks (2009). However, rather than presenting children with an elaborate context, they used a short introductory sentence that unambiguously established the correct referent as the discourse topic. They interpret their results as indicating that children’s grammar underdetermines the interpretation of pronouns. Because children’s interpretations only conform to Principle B if the discourse structure provides a clear topic, they conclude that children’s comprehension of pronouns is sensitive to discourse structure and that children are actually helped by the discourse. The different and partly contradictory conclusions of these two studies raise questions regarding children’s knowledge of Principle B and the exact contribution of discourse context to pronoun interpretation. The aim of the present study is to shed more light on the second issue by performing an eyetracking study with Dutch adults. In this study, we test adults’ comprehension of object pronouns and reflexives while manipulating the discourse context. This paper is organized as follows. First, we discuss the off-line studies of Conroy et al. and Spenader et al. with children in more detail. On the