PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In four experiments, we plan to replicate the self-paced reading and eye-tracking during reading experiments reported by Koornneef/van Berkum (2006). The authors drew on the observation that certain interpersonal verbs, such as "amuse" and "admire", are associated with a strong bias in favor of explanations about either their subject or their object argument: the Implicit Causality bias. They found that a pronoun that is incongruent with this bias leads to longer self-paced reading times, first fixation durations, first pass durations and regression path durations on or shortly after the pronoun, relative to a congruent pronoun. They concluded that readers use Implicit Causality to guide comprehension at an early point in processing, rather than only at the end of the sentence. We previously failed to replicate the effect conceptually in German, and now plan to perform two direct replications in Dutch (one for each methodology) and two corresponding replications with the original materials translated into German, each with three times the original number of participants.