Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments tested the view that thematic roie information triggers the rapid retrieval of general knowledge in pronoun comprehension. Pairs of thematic roles were contrasted as antecedents of a subsequent pronoun. The results showed that intepretation of the pronoun depended on the thematic role of the antecedent. Experiment one measured reading rates for the clause which contained the pronoun. Rates were faster when the antecedent was an Agent subject, a Patient object, a Goal, or an Experiencer. Rates were slower when the antecedent was an Agent object, a Patient subject, a Source, or a Stimulus. Experiment two required subjects to write completions to sentence fragments such as Jill like Sue and she and the number of references to each antecedent was recorded. The results confirmed the findings from Experiment one, although there was also an antecedent position effect (first vs. second mention) in some of the sentences. We suggest that these results are consistent with the view that thematic role information triggers the retrieval of canonical events in the real world, and may thus be responsible for the rapid retrieval of general knowledge in language comprehension.