Processing of coreferential relations and their relationship with the working memory: the influence of syntactic distance on anaphora processing in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it is understood that the processing of coreference resolution is closely related to the working memory. In this relationship between memory and anaphora resolution, the distance factor between the referent and anaphor can play a significant role as distance increases the processing costs when reading sentences. It is known that the working memory is limited; yet there is still no consensus among researchers regarding the nature of storable items. Moreover, the syntactic node, here taken as a representative of the structure of a phrase, was observed as possible storage and recoverable unit in the working memory. Thus, the objective of the study was to verify whether the syntactic distance factor, embeddings with 1 and 2 intervening syntactic nodes, is a storable unit in the working memory, investigating its influence in the processing of different anaphora resolution. The self-paced reading experimental technique was used in an experiment. Seventy participants, all university students, were tested individually and underwent a training session before the task. The results suggest that the syntactic distance is a relevant factor in the working memory with significant differences between conditions with syntactic distance concerning those with linear distance, indicating the formation of chunks. There was an increase in reading times depending on the number of intervening embeddings, and different processing costs for each type of anaphora resolution investigated.

The aim of the present work was to investigate the processing of coreferential relations, focusing on their relationship with the working memory. In a reading process, it is essential that readers continuously perform mental operations that involve the working memory, such as storing, retrieving, and manipulating information. For this reason, it is understood that the processing of coreference resolution is closely related to the working memory. In this relationship between memory and anaphora resolution, the distance factor between the referent and anaphor can play a significant role as distance increases the processing costs when reading sentences. It is known that the working memory is limited; yet there is still no consensus among researchers regarding the nature of storable items. Moreover, the syntactic node, here taken as a representative of the structure of a phrase, was observed as possible storage and recoverable unit in the working memory. Thus, the objective of the study was to verify whether the syntactic distance factor, embeddings with 1 and 2 intervening syntactic nodes, is a storable unit in the working memory, investigating its influence in the processing of different anaphora resolution. The self-paced reading experimental technique was used in an experiment. Seventy participants, all university students, were tested individually and underwent a training session before the task. The results suggest that the syntactic distance is a relevant factor in the working memory with significant differences between conditions with syntactic distance concerning those with linear distance, indicating the formation of chunks. There was an increase in reading times depending on the number of intervening embeddings, and different processing costs for each type of anaphora resolution investigated.