Experimental research on anaphor resolution

Anaphor resolution, for example, identifying who or what a pronoun is referring to, is not trivial. As soon as there are two possible referents, a language user has to decide which referent is the correct one. Language users can make use of cues, for example, grammatical gender, syntactic function, or animacy. In this seminar, we will have a look at recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic findings on anaphor resolution. We will look both at successful and unsuccessful anaphor resolutions. We will pay attention not only to the findings but also to the way of getting there, i.e., the experimental design and method employed. Students will choose a research question concerning anaphors and will design their own study during the course of the semester. (no data acquisition will be done, an experimental draft is what we are aiming for)