Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study explores the way discourse structure information is used during encoding of linguistic representations, using the distinction between main and subordinate information as a case study. We use the two contrasting constructions: (a) “The singers\textsubscript{MAIN} who admired the violinists\textsubscript{MAIN} invited their mentors to the party”; (b) “The singers\textsubscript{MAIN}, who admired the violinists\textsubscript{SUBORDINATE}, invited their mentors to the party.” While both contain discourse-main information, (b) includes discourse-subordinate information in the clause ``who admired \textit{the violinists}.” Importantly, \textit{the singers} and \textit{the violinists} are both plausible antecedents for \textit{their}, but the overlap in discourse-information between the two NPs differs: (a) overlap ({MAIN, MAIN}); (b) no overlap ({MAIN, SUBORDINATE}). Through two web-based eye-tracking experiments using a visual world paradigm, we find that this overlap leads to competition between the two NPs, evidenced by eye-gaze differences, (a) < (b). We also find that this effect manifests early, even before retrieval, i.e., before pronoun resolution.