Processing of Deep and Surface Anaphors: A Replication and Extension of Tanenhaus, Carlson and Seidenberg (1985)

• Published in: Toronto working papers in linguistics Vol. 22; pp. 1 - 40
• Main Author: Belanger, Suzanne
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2004
• ISSN: 1705-8619

Tanenhaus, Carlson, & Seidenberg (1985) found striking evidence that deep & surface anaphors, as described in Hankamer & Sag (1976) & Sag & Hankamer (1984), access different levels of representation during resolution. We argue that a full interpretation of their results is not possible without control conditions. Specifically, it is not clear whether surface anaphors affect the linguistic representation by keeping it active or whether deep anaphors affect the linguistic representation through suppression. We ran two experiments intended to replicate their main finding & also to shed light on the activation/suppression issue. We failed to replicate their result in experiment 1. Our second experiment controlled for possible confounds & replicated their result. Moreover, the results supported the hypothesis that suppression is involved with deep anaphors. Further research is required, however, to determine whether surface anaphors affect the level of activation of the linguistic representation or not. 10 Tables, 49 References. Adapted from the source document