The activation of spatial antecedents from overt pronouns in american sign language

Two experiments are presented which investigate the processing of pronominal reference in American Sign Language (ASL). Pronominal reference in ASL involves the association of nominals with loci in signing space, and pronouns are directed towards these spatial loci. Deaf subjects viewed videotaped ASL sentences with and without pronouns and responded to probe signs presented either immediately after the pronoun or after a 1000-msec delay. In both experiments, we found evidence for referent activation by an overt pronoun: responses to referent probes were faster when a pronoun was present in the sentence. Experiment 1 indicated that pronoun activation was not immediate, and there was no strong evidence for the inhibition of non-referents. Experiment 2 was designed to investigate whether the pronoun also activated a representation of the spatial locus associated with the referent. If the pronoun activates a spatial representation, we predicted that spatially incongruent probes would produce a greater interference effect when a pronoun was present compared to a neutral sentence condition. However, no interference effect or interaction with sentence condition was observed. These results suggest that some aspects of anaphor processing hold cross-modally and cross-linguistically (referent activation) and some aspects may depend upon the nature of the pronominal system (non-referent inhibition).