Sample visual picture panel. In the reflexive condition (e.g., The soldier told the farmer with glasses to shave himself in the bathroom ), the farmer is the target and soldier is the competitor. For the pronoun condition (e.g., The soldier told the farmer with glasses to shave him in the bathroom ), the soldier is the target and the farmer is the competitor. 

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... to 77 ( M 5 47.83, SD 5 13.55). There were no statistical differences between the control group and the aphasic group in terms of age or education (see Table 1). All participants also demonstrated good visual and hearing acuity and did not have complicating medical conditions such as psychiatric disturbances, alcohol/drug abuse and pre-morbid speech, language and learning disorders. Patients’ hearing acuity was screened with a pure-tone audiometer at 60db at 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, and 2000 Hz and patients’ vision and oculomotor performance was screened with a task in which patients were asked to look at certain pictures of items on the screen and follow the fingertip of the examiner with their eyes. All participants provided informed consent prior to the study. The aphasic participants were recruited from the Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory at Northwestern University. Aphasia type and severity were assessed using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB; Kertesz, 1982). The selection criteria for the aphasic participants are as follows. All participants were mildly to moderately impaired, with WAB Aphasia Quotients (AQs) ranging from 62 to 86.4 ( M 5 71.6, SD 5 8.6) and comprehension scores ranging from 8 to 9.8 ( M 5 8.6, SD 5 0.6). (See Table 2.) Their aphasia resulted from a single-episode, left- hemisphere stroke and they were all at least 1 year post-stroke at the time of testing ( M 5 4.8 years). All aphasic participants showed agrammatic speech production and impaired comprehension of complex movement sentences such as passives or object relative sentences in the face of relatively spared comprehension of simple active sentences. Sentence comprehension data derived from administration of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS; Thompson, experimental version) are shown in Table 2. The NAVS is a test developed for research purposes in the Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Laboratory at Northwestern University to detail aphasic sentence comprehension and production deficits. The test is currently being standardised for publication. Materials for the study consisted of 60 pairs of stories and panels depicting objects mentioned in the stories. Of the story–panel pairs, 40 served as experimental items while the remaining 20 served as fillers. All stories had the same structure consisting of three sentences: an introductory sentence, which introduced two animate NPs involved in the story (e.g., Some soldiers and farmers were in a house ), a second sentence containing the critical transitive event (e.g., The soldier told the farmer with a glasses to shave him/himself in the bathroom ), and a final closing sentence (e.g., And he did ). Filler stories included active critical sentences without a reflexive or pronoun (e.g., The pastor told the choirboy with crutches to sing a song at school ). The rationale for using such filler items was to minimise the expectation of reflexives and pronouns in the critical second sentence. Each test story was used twice, once with a reflexive and once with a pronoun. Four independent raters who were native speakers of English were asked to rate the grammaticality, plausibility, and naturalness of the sentences and stories on a 5-point scale. Only stories that were rated higher than 4 on these parameters by all raters were used as stimuli for the study. Each story was followed by a comprehension probe, which tested offline comprehension of the critical event in the second sentence as seen in (4). For the test stories, the probe questions queried either a pronoun, ‘‘Did the farmer shave the soldier?’’, or a reflexive structure, ‘‘Did the farmer shave himself?’’. The answer to the first probe question was ‘‘no’’ for the reflexive condition and ‘‘yes’’ for the pronoun condition, whereas the answer to the second probe question was ‘‘yes’’ for the reflexive and ‘‘no’’ for the pronoun condition. Half of the stories for each condition included probe questions of the first form and the other half used probe questions of the second form. Hence, overall there were an equal number of questions requiring ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’ responses. For the fillers, the probe questions were of the form ‘‘ Did the choirboy/pastor sing the song? ’’. The answer to half of the filler probes was ‘‘yes’’ and the answer to the other half was ‘‘no’’ (see Appendix for the complete set of stimuli.) The stories were digitally recorded by a female native speaker of English at a natural pace with standard intonation using SoundEdit (Macromedia). The verbs included in the second sentence were all reversible transitive verbs and the two human referents, (e.g., soldier and farmer ), inanimate objects (e.g., glasses ) mentioned in the stories, and distractor items (human nouns) used on the visual panels (see below) (e.g., patient ) were controlled for lemma frequency, syllable length, and phonological onset. The three human nouns were matched for gender. For each story a visual panel such as in Figure 1 was constructed containing the nouns mentioned in each story. The panel was divided into a 3 6 3 grid with a fixation cross in the centre of the panel. The panel contained four items, one in each corner: the two possible antecedents (e.g., soldier and farmer ) and the inanimate object (e.g., glasses ) that were mentioned in the story and a human distractor (e.g., patient ), which was not mentioned in the story. The inanimate object was included to detract participants’ gaze from the previously mentioned item (e.g., farmer ). This way, eye movements to the pronoun or reflexive would not reflect residual activation of the previous noun. The distractor noun served as a control in comparing looks to antecedents of either the pronoun or reflexive. The position of each item on the panel was pseudo-randomised across stories and the panels in adjacent trials never had the same elements appearing in the same positions. Further, the items appeared equally often in each position across panels. This ensured that all items were equally likely to appear in any of the four positions on any given trial. Further, the positions of the objects were evenly distributed across experimental conditions. Participants were just as likely to see the object in one of the positions for stories for the reflexive condition as they were for stories for the pronoun condition. The pictures for the nouns were obtained from 100,000 ClipArt (GSP Limited) or from www.clipart.com. The pictures were edited as 4 6 3 inch black and white pictures and copied onto the panels with Adobe Photoshop. Pictures for all four nouns for all test stories were matched in style of drawing as well as in size and were rated by four independent raters for differences in prominence of the four pictures that would attract more or less looks than the other pictures in a rest condition. The pictures that were judged to be different in prominence in the panel by more than one rater were edited to match the prominence of the other pictures or substituted with different pictures. The raters were also asked to point to the nouns named, and any pictures that raters had difficulty recognising were omitted or substituted. Two pseudo-randomised scripts were developed. Both scripts contained 20 test stories with reflexives and 20 test stories with pronouns. The stories that included reflexives in script 1 were used with pronouns in script 2 and vice versa. The stories were pseudo-randomly selected for either the reflexive or pronoun condition so that the lemma frequency of items on the panels was balanced across conditions. The same 20 filler stories were used for both scripts. The order of stories in the two scripts was pseudo-randomised so that no more than two stories with the same condition (either reflexive or pronoun) occurred consecutively. The auditory and visual stimuli were assembled into the two scripts using SUPERLAB (Cedrus). Testing was completed in one session of approximately 1 hour. At the beginning of the session participants were given two practice stories before being presented with the test stimuli. Participants were instructed to listen to the stories while looking at the monitor. They were also instructed to verbally answer the questions at the end of the story. The auditory and visual stimuli were presented using SUPERLAB. The auditory stimuli were presented via loudspeakers and the visual stimuli were presented on a Macintosh monitor. First, a blank screen appeared on the computer monitor for 1500 milliseconds. The blank screen served as a signal that the next item was starting. Then a panel appeared on the screen, which remained visible throughout the whole trial. The story began 1000 milliseconds after the panel appeared in order to allow time for scene apprehension. Once the story was complete there was a beep, followed by a comprehension probe that the participants answered orally. After responding, the experimenter pressed the space bar on the keyboard, which advanced to the next trial. The next trial then began with a blank screen, as described above. Eye movements were monitored and recorded by an Applied Science Laboratories (ASL) remote eyetracker model 504 while the participants looked at the panels and listened to the story. The camera assessed eye position by monitoring the offset between the infrared reflection from the surface of the cornea and the infrared reflection off the retina and passing through the pupil. This offset was calibrated for each participant at the beginning of the experimental session, and checked every 10 trials by having the participant look at nine numbers on the screen. Participants were told to move only their eyes, not their body or head, if possible. No chinrest or headrest was used to stabilise movement. The eyetracking data were collected using EYENAL (ASL analysis software). The position and direction of the eye movements were sampled every 16 ms by the remote eyetracker. The measurements of ...