The processing of nominal and pronominal anaphoric encapsulation in L2 Spanish speakers: an experimental study with eyetracking

Encapsulation is a discursive anaphora, since a neuter pronoun or a nominal syntagm is used to refer to textual elements already introduced in the discourse, but the reference is not established with a simple linguistic unit, but with a broader textual fragment. While a neutral pronoun such as spanish ello has an essentially procedural meaning and provides the reader only with the instruction to search the preceding discourse for a sentence construction that serves as a referent, the nominal encapsulator synthesizes the referent, recategorizes it, and involves a reification of an abstract entity. Anaphoric encapsulation is a discursive operation employed in highly planned texts typical of various specialty languages (academic, scientific, political, etc.). An eyetracking reading experiment conducted with 44 L2 Spanish speakers shows that non-native speakers apply different information extraction strategies depending on whether the encapsulation is established by means of a nominal or a pronominal element.