Abstract

Anaphoric encapsulators are referential expressions which, as they compress textual segments of predicative nature, are expected to present different and more complex processing patterns than those of coreferential expressions, since, for their interpretation, it is necessary to recover an explicature. However, references to encapsulation processing are still scarce and there are hardly any experimental studies that offer data on this subject. In this paper the results of an eye -tracking experiment comparing the processing efforts of two types of non-(re)categorizing encapsulators (neutral demonstrative pronoun and deverbal nominalizations) with analogous coreferential mechanisms (coreferential demonstrative pronoun and lexical repetition) are analyzed. The results demonstrate that the processing efforts of utterances containing encapsulators are not higher than those that contain coreferential expressions, but the processing profile of encapsulation is qualitatively different from coreference. In addition, in the case of encapsulators, it is shown that neutral demonstrative pronouns do not reduce processing efforts in comparison with deverbal nominalizations.