The correlational structure of judgments of grammatical coreference is examined using factor analysis and the results are used to identify the dimensions of grammatical variation in competent speakers of English. The dimensions that are discovered do not correspond to those typically discussed in generative linguistics but they can be explained very naturally by a model in which coreference is achieved through a process in which linguistic expressions are mapped onto a model of discourse.

Causality plays an important role in giving discourse its characteristic coherence. This paper examines how causality implicit in an utterance helps to organize dynamically constructed mental models of discourse. Experiments are reported suggesting that the linguistic form of utterances contributes significant semantic information about causality to a discourse representation. This view is contrasted with competing claims in the literature that causality only emerges from social psychological inferences or optional inferences on background knowledge.

Neuropsychological investigations with frontal patientshave revealed selective deficits in selecting the relationalanswer to pictorial analogy problems when the correctoption is embedded among foils that exhibit highsemantic or visual similarity. In contrast, normal age-matched controls solve the same problems with near-perfect accuracy regardless of whether high-similarityfoils are present (in the absence of speed pressure).Using more sensitive measures, the present study soughtto determine whether or not normal young adults aresubject to such interference. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking while participants answered multiple-choice 4-term pictorial analogies. Total looking time was longerfor semantically similar foils relative to an irrelevantfoil. Experiment 2 presented the same problems in atrue/false format with emphasis on rapid responding andfound that reaction time to correctly reject falseanalogies was greater (and errors rates higher) for thosebased on semantically or visually similar foils. Thesefindings demonstrate that healthy young adults aresensitive to both semantic and visual similarity whensolving pictorial analogy problems. Results areinterpreted in relation to neurocomputational models ofrelational processing.