Person-based prominence guides incremental processing: Evidence from obviation in Ojibwe

Distinctions related to person and animacy have long been known to impact both the grammar and incremental processing in a way that can be described through “prominence” scales. We put the generalizability of these scales to the test by examining the processing effects of a typologically rare distinction known as obviation, which is found in Ojibwe, an Indigenous language of North America. Obviation contrasts the single most discourse-salient animate third person (PROXIMATE) with other non-salient third persons (OBVIATIVE). Using a visual world paradigm, we show that obviation influences parsing and interpretation commitments under incremental ambiguity: Proximate nouns are assumed to be the agent of an action, while obviative nouns do not lead to strong incremental commitments. The result parallels previous findings in other languages with distinctions related to animacy and person, supporting a theory where the effect of prominence information in processing is the result of a common set of constraints derived from the alignment of scales related to person, syntactic position, and thematic role.

关于人称与生命体差异对语法及增量处理产生的影响，早已为人们所熟知，这种影响可通过“显著性”等级进行描述。我们通过对北美土著语言奥吉布瓦语中一种类型学上罕见的差异——回避现象的处理效应进行考察，来对这些等级的普适性进行检验。回避现象将最具话语显著性（邻近）的单一生命体第三人称（PROXIMATE）与其他非显著性第三人称（回避）进行对比。运用视觉世界范式，我们发现回避现象在增量模糊性下会影响句法分析和解释承诺：邻近名词被视为动作的施事者，而回避名词则不会导致强烈的增量承诺。这一结果与在其他具有生命体和人称差异的语言中发现的先前研究结果相呼应，支持了这样一个理论：处理中显著性信息的影响是源于与人称、句法位置和主位角色相关等级的对齐所衍生出的共同约束集合。