Tavares, G. , Fajardo, I. , Ávila, V. , Ferrer, A. & Salmerón, L.
Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology. University of Valencia. Valencia, Spain.
This study investigates how students with intellectual disability and low reading comprehension levels process and resolve anaphoric pronouns. The influence of the order of mention of the antecedent and its syntactic function in the resolution of ambiguous pronouns in Spanish texts were tested by means of the analyses of readers’ eye movements. Eighteen participants with intellectual disability read 32 counterbalanced mini-stories of two sentences in a self-paced reading task. The first sentence contained 2 proper names. The second sentence began with a subject pronoun (the anaphor) referring to either the subject or the object of the first sentence. The arguments immediately following the pronoun disambiguated it. The study followed a 2 (antecedent position: first mentioned name vs. second mentioned name) x 2 (antecedent function: subject vs. object) within-participant design. For several pre-defined areas of interests (object and subject of the first sentence and disambiguation area in the second sentence), the number of regressions, gaze durations, first fixation, regression path and total fixations were calculated. The congruence of the preliminary analysis of these measures with the use of a less costly general cognitive strategy for pronoun referent assignment (first mentioned account) versus a grammatical analysis (subject preference account) is discussed.