Faculty Bibliography

Four studies with 126 college students contrasted the processing of anaphor resolution for 2 types of anaphors: pronouns and repeated nouns. Ss were presented with an antecedent-related probe, following 2 sentence discourses ending in a pronoun or repeated noun. Ss made 1 of 3 judgments about the probe word: recognition, category decision, or lexical decision. Stronger facilitation in the category task occurred following the pronoun; facilitation in the lexical decision task occurred only following the noun-anaphor. In the recognition study, response times to probe words were faster following the pronoun and showed a greater facilitation for concrete than for abstract probes. Data support the notion that pronouns provide greater immediate sensitivity to conceptual aspects of the antecedent. When the probe word was presented at a 250-msec delay, responses following the noun-anaphor also showed a greater facilitation to concrete probes.