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Kaiser and Tannenhaus are at Rochester, Trueswell I think was one of Tannenhaus' students from a decade or more ago (and probably Elsie Kaiser's Doktorvater at Penn). It's good to see Elsie's gotten other Finnish researchers to work on eye-tracking studies.
I think that the article makes English pronoun resolution to be less ambiguous than it actually is. Other research (not cited) makes English quirkier than usually thought, so that neither account referred to works adequately for English. And intonation in English plays a role--it was thought to just signal switch reference (i.e., figure out which of the two people the pronoun refers to without the funky intonation, and interpret it as referring to the other one), but that doesn't work very well. OK, it doesn't work at all, really.
I don't think I'd have chosen Finnish, though--it marks its grammatical objects a bit too nicely. There are a few languages that have discourse-driven word order *and* no case marking that I'm aware of ... unfortunately, they're not always in convenient areas. Moreover, Elsie Kaiser's done a bit of unrelated work showing how case marking and reference conspire to affect sentence interpretation. I don't see a reference in a quick scan of the article to non-neutral word orders, which would have been nice, as well. And isn't Finnish pro-drop (i.e., you don't need overt pronouns)?
Still, it's good to see somebody taking issue with Elsie. It'll keep her on her toes.
And nearly any research with discourse-driven word order languages--especially when they put the target sentences in proper discourse settings--is good research. And it's good to see eye-tracking done with something other than English and Dutch.
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