A NOTE ON PARALLELISM EFFECTS IN PROCESSING DEEP AND SURFACE VERB-PHRASE ANAPHORA

Tanenhaus and Carlson (1990, experiment 1) reported that surface anaph ors were more difficult to comprehend than deep anaphors when the ante cedent for the anaphor did not form a syntactic constituent, i.e. when it was presented in a passive construction as compared to an active c onstruction and the anaphor was in active voice. However, parallelism of the antecedent did affect the time it took readers to comprehend de ep anaphors. This paper reports a reanalysis of that data and two expe riments based on the reanalysis. The parallelism effects for deep anap hors were completely eliminated following short passives but not full passives. The results are interpreted as support for the claim that de ep and surface anaphors access different types of representations. We also suggest that previous findings of parallelism effects for deep an aphors may be due to factors other than structural parallelism.