The Effected Factors Of Anaphoric Inference During Reading Process

This research is designed to explore three text factors that influence the accessibility of antecedents: referential distance between the anaphor and its antecedent(anaphoric distance),the elaboration of distractor, the typicality of distractor. The main manipulation of the study was to separate the elaboration of distractor and the typicality of distractor. We want to test their effect for the anaphoric inference. It includes two experiments, hi experiment 1,using a line-by-line reading paradigm and recognition probe measures to explore the effect of distractor's elaboration(extensive elaboration, there is one short sentence mentioning the antecedent but there are four sentence related to the low disractor, eg.,bread; non-extensive elaboration, only one sentence mentioning the low distractor,eg.,bread) to anaphoric inference. The experiment results indicated that antecedents (eg. "cake") were fastly accessed when an anaphor (eg. "dessert") was read when the antecedents was backgrounded by the extensive elaboration of same-category low distractor (eg. "bread"),low distractor's elaboration didn't hinder the accessibility of antecedent consequently lead to anaphor resolution fail. Meanwhile, the role of referential distance as a single factor was tested, the finding is inference distance was not sufficient to eliminate anaphor resolution, this is identical to the results of Levine et al (2000).experiment 1 shows that elaboration of distractor was not a main factor influencing anaphor resolution.In experiment 2,using the same test measures, studying the effect the relative change of the distractor's typicality and the antecedent's typicality to anaphoric inference . Experiment 2a was a 2x2 two factors design, main purpose was to explore hi different referential distance what's effect of the distractor's typicality to anaphoric inference. The results shows that high-typicality of the distractor cause the anaphor was not resolved. Moreover, high-typicality in long-distance condition and in short-distance condition was not significant to the anaphor resolution . In experiment 2b,we change the typicality of the distractors and the antecedents at the same time, the results still indicated high-typicality was the main factor of the anaphoric inference drawing, and this influence was independent of the change of antecedent typicality.Based on experiment 1 and 2 and previous, we suggested that the effected factor of anaphoric inference is a complicated interaction of the text factors, the maui factor is the typicality of distractor-the semantic overlap between the anaphor and antecedent.The study results suggested that increasing the typicality of same-category distractor will cause anaphoric inference resolution fail. It seemed can't be explained by O'Brien's( 1998) resonance model. As resonance model, when anaphor was read all concepts currently in short-term memory serve as cue can be activated. For the explanation, one is the anaphor we use didn't demand resolution, it can either be used anaphorically or to introduce a new concept. The other explanation was Mckoon and Ratcliffs(1997) minimalist hypothesis. It appears that readers didn't draw anaphoric inference because the antecedent was not easily available and the inference was not necessary from comprehension.