{"title":"D-linking or set-restriction? Processing Which-questions in Dutch","authors":"J. Donkers, J. Hoeks, L. Stowe","doi":"10.1080/01690965.2011.566343","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Research on Wh-questions suggests that Which questions are harder to process than Who questions (e.g., Who/Which athlete won the competition?). According to the Discourse (D)-linking Hypothesis, Which-questions differ from Who-questions in that Which questions need a link to a preceding discourse, while Who questions do not. However, this difference in processing may also be caused by differences in “set-restriction.” Who is much less restrictive in the set of potential referents it presupposes than Which N (e.g., Which athlete). A self-paced reading study investigated how Who and Which N questions were processed compared to questions involving the generic Which person, which refer to the same relatively unrestrictive referential set as Who. Our results showed that Which N questions were significantly more difficult than Which person or Who questions in object initial structures, supporting the hypothesis that increased processing cost for Which should be explained by a mechanism of set-restriction inherent to Which N questions. Additionally we found that the syntactic role of the possible referents in the discourse context affects question processing before the readers encountered disambiguating information.","PeriodicalId":87410,"journal":{"name":"Language and cognitive processes","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/01690965.2011.566343","citationCount":"18","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language and cognitive processes","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.566343","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 18
Abstract
Research on Wh-questions suggests that Which questions are harder to process than Who questions (e.g., Who/Which athlete won the competition?). According to the Discourse (D)-linking Hypothesis, Which-questions differ from Who-questions in that Which questions need a link to a preceding discourse, while Who questions do not. However, this difference in processing may also be caused by differences in “set-restriction.” Who is much less restrictive in the set of potential referents it presupposes than Which N (e.g., Which athlete). A self-paced reading study investigated how Who and Which N questions were processed compared to questions involving the generic Which person, which refer to the same relatively unrestrictive referential set as Who. Our results showed that Which N questions were significantly more difficult than Which person or Who questions in object initial structures, supporting the hypothesis that increased processing cost for Which should be explained by a mechanism of set-restriction inherent to Which N questions. Additionally we found that the syntactic role of the possible referents in the discourse context affects question processing before the readers encountered disambiguating information.