Fixation Time on Anaphoric Pronouns Decreases With Congruity of Reference

Subjects' eye movements were recorded while they read sets of 3 contextually related sentences from a slide projector. The subject of the first sentence was a ROLE (eg Engineer), this was followed by a filler sentence, and the third sentence contained an anaphoric PRONOUN (He/She). Each set either matched the sex stereotype (“He” referring to “engineer”), did not match (“She” referring to “surgeon”) or was neutral (reference to a “gender-unconstrained” role like “patient” or “student”). Measures were taken of fixation duration and inspection duration upon the pronoun in the third sentence of each set of sentences, together with total reading time. All three measures were longer for sentences containing incongruous (non-matching) pronouns. These results suggest that pragmatic information is used as part of the process of comprehension.