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Processing of discourse anaphors by L2 speakers of English

Paper · 2021 · Derya Çokal, Patrick Sturt and Fernanda Ferreira

Summary

The study asks how advanced Turkish learners of English decide what the demonstratives this and that point back to when the antecedent is a whole event in written discourse. It also asks whether these L2 readers follow the same cues as native speakers. Two accounts are compared. The proximal-distal model says this picks the adjacent clause and that a more distant one. The focus model says the two words signal different degrees of attention to the referent. The authors ran two eye-tracking reading experiments and one sentence-completion task. They used three-sentence mini-stories in which a duration phrase ("took him 2 hours" vs. "5 minutes") makes only one of two earlier events plausible as the antecedent. The results were compared with native-speaker data from Çokal et al. (2014).

During reading, the L2 group showed no recency strategy and used neither distance nor focus cues of the demonstratives. In completions, discourse prominence affected their choices much as it did for natives, but their sense of how much focus each demonstrative carries differed. The authors attribute the gap to L1 (Turkish) interference.

Key points

  • Participants were advanced Turkish EFL learners. They are compared with English native speakers tested in Çokal, Sturt & Ferreira (2014) on the same paradigm.
  • The design has three experiments: two eye-tracking reading studies (online processing) and one sentence-completion study (offline production).
  • In each item, a distal-frontier event (e.g., a long drive) and a proximal-frontier event (e.g., refuelling) are followed by a "This/That took X time" sentence. The stated duration makes only one antecedent plausible.
  • Native speakers in the earlier study used recency plus the focus encoded by the demonstratives. The L2 readers showed neither pattern online.
  • Offline, the L2 group's sensitivity to discourse prominence was qualitatively native-like, but their mapping of focus onto this vs. that was not.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Using world-knowledge plausibility (how long an activity normally takes) to silently force one antecedent is a clean way to probe event anaphora without any explicit question.
  • I2. The materials come in minimal quadruples (this/that × proximal/distal referent) that differ only in a demonstrative and a duration phrase, which isolates single cues.
  • I3. The paper contrasts two competing accounts of demonstratives: linear distance vs. degree of attention or focus. These yield different, testable predictions for the same text.
  • I4. The authors compare online reading behaviour against offline completion choices and find they can diverge. This suggests that a system's resolution preferences and its production preferences should be measured separately.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): event entities could carry typical-duration values from compiled knowledge, so a later "this took 5 minutes" can be checked against candidate events and the implausible one rejected.
  • I2 (learn): we could build similar controlled minimal-pair sets for evaluation, where a correct resolver must flip its answer exactly when the cue flips, acting as a negative control against shallow heuristics.
  • I3 (frames): the coreference module could score demonstrative antecedents with separate, explainable features for recency and focus/salience, and log which one decided the choice.
  • I4 (back): when generating text from the meaning graph, the choice between this and that for an event referent could be checked against how the resolver would reinterpret it, keeping generation and comprehension consistent.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of EdinburghEdinburgh · United Kingdom255 works · 68,771 citations🎓Queen Mary University of LondonLondon · United Kingdom39 works · 3,307 citations🎓University of California, DavisDavis · United States13 works · 41,713 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksNeuroscience · 95 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 95 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksCoreference resolution · 550 worksDiscourse analysis · 394 works

Cite

Cite as Derya Çokal, Patrick Sturt and Fernanda Ferreira. 2021. Processing of discourse anaphors by L2 speakers of English. Dialogue & Discourse.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5210/dad.2021.202

@inproceedings{cokal2021processing,
  title = {{Processing of discourse anaphors by L2 speakers of English}},
  author = {Derya Çokal, Patrick Sturt and Fernanda Ferreira},
  booktitle = {Dialogue \& Discourse},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5210/dad.2021.202},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.202}
}

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