The Role of Discourse Prominence in Antecedent Search: The Case of Genitive Noun Phrases

The research investigated how readers comprehended reflexive pronoun anaphors (e.g., himself or herself) that occurred in the same sentence with an antecedent that was modified by a genitive noun phrase (NP). Prior research suggested that during the search for an antecedent, readers consider only those preceding discourse entities that are prominent in the discourse; thus, genitive NPs would not be considered because they lack discourse prominence (Badecker & Straub, 2002). Two reading experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, genitive NPs were noun descriptions that were strongly stereotyped for gender (e.g., “The executive’s/secretary’s father cut himself…”). In Experiment 2, genitive NPs were gender-specific proper names (e.g., “John’s/Mary’s father cut himself…”), similar to those used in the prior research. The results indicated that genitive NPs that were strongly stereotyped for gender influenced sentence processing time, but genitive NPs that were gender-specific proper names did not; thus, genitive NPs are not uniformly excluded from consideration during the resolution of reflexive pronouns.