Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Pronouns (she, they) are semantically underspecified and depend on context for interpretation. One proposal is thatinterpretation occurs by reactivating a pronouns antecedent, consistent with memory reinstatement models. We evaluatethis account using a novel task where the semantics of the antecedent are no longer appropriate after an instruction iscompleted (e.g., Move the house on the left to area 3, where the result is that ANOTHER house is now the leftmost one).If antecedent semantics are activated when subsequently hearing a pronoun (”Now put it”), listeners should experienceconfusion regarding the intended referent. However, measures of (i) the object selected, (ii) mouse-click reaction times,and (iii) eye-movements all demonstrate the pronoun is effortlessly linked to the previously-mentioned object, regardlessof whether antecedent semantics are still relevant. This demonstrates that pronouns have indexical meaning, denoting afocused referent directly, and are not mediated by activating linguistic antecedents in discourse memory.