NON-ANTECEDENT SUPPRESSION IN AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE

Previous studies have suggested that ASL pronouns may not suppress the activation of non-antecedents during sentence processing. Using a pro be recognition task, Experiment 1 investigated whether lack of suppres sion may be due to the morphological ambiguity of an ASL pronoun when it is unassociated with a spatial locus. Suppression was predicted for unambiguous repeated nouns but not for spatially unassociated pronoun s. The results indicated that neither repeated nouns nor ASL pronouns suppressed non-antecedents. The lack of suppression by repeated nouns was surprising and may have been due to the presence of a new discours e participant in the control sentence. Experiment 2 used a before-anap hor baseline condition, and the results indicated that both ASL pronou ns and repeated nouns suppressed the activation of non-antecedents. Th ese findings suggest that (1) spatial loci which disambiguate antecede nts of ASL pronouns may be similar to gender marking in English with r espect to ambiguity resolution and non-antecedent suppression, and tha t (2) probe recognition taps a level of representation at which pronou ns and spatial loci are associated. Overall, the results indicate that spoken and signed languages use the same processing mechanisms in res olving co-reference relations.