Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important question is whether speakers consider listeners’expectations when choosing whether to use a pronoun. It hasbeen suggested that certain thematic roles are more expectedto be mentioned again, and are therefore more likely to bepronominalized. In the present study, we aim to disentanglepredictability effects on pronoun use from thematic-role ef-fects. To this end, we conducted two web-based continuationexperiments in Dutch, in which the next-mention biases asso-ciated with Source-Goal and Agent-Patient verbs were ma-nipulated to create a shift in the bias. Experiment 1 confirmedthat the manipulations changed the biases. Experiment 2showed that while thematic role mainly influenced demon-strative and full pronoun use for non-subjects, next-mentionbiases played a role in the choice between reduced and fullpronouns and between pronouns and full NPs, irrespective ofthematic role or grammatical function. Thus, thematic roleand predictability seem to affect pronoun use in differentways.