Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report two experiments investigating how the interpretationof subject-position pronouns is guided by the referentialstructure of the pronoun-containing clause, and how thisinformation interacts with information available in the clausethat precedes the pronoun. Thus, we consider information thatis available to the language processing system before thepronoun is encountered (pre-pronominal information), as wellas information that comes after the pronoun (post-pronominalinformation). In particular, we test how implicit causalitybiases of verbs that precede the pronoun-containing clauseinteract with the referential structure of the pronoun-containingclause, i.e., whether or not the clause with the pronoun containsanother ambiguous pronoun. We report two offline studieswhose results reveal significant effects of both pre- and post-pronominal referential information on pronoun resolution: Inaddition to replicating effects of implicit causality biasesobserved in prior work, we also show that people’s referentialbiases depend on whether the clause contains only a subject-position pronoun or also a second pronoun in object position.