Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Using an on-line window display technique, the present study investigated how two features of antecedent information (the relationship and the distance with current information) affected the access of antecedent information, which was informed appropriately or inappropriately in the previous text. In Experiment 1, participants read passages sentence by sentence at their own pace and made judgments about probe words that were either appropriate or inappropriate anaphoric referents. The probe words were presented in the normal text through changing the color of the words. The data demonstrated that the inappropriate information remained a candidate antecedent despite the presence of a strong exclusionary statement that indicated it was incorrect. In Experiment 2, we varied the relative lags between different antecedent information and the test anaphor. Participants read passages word by word and named the probe words. The results showed that the appropriate anaphoric referents were accessed faster than the inappropriate ones, while the factor of distance had no effect on the activation level of the anaphoric referents.

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