Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A primary constraint on using a pronominal anaphor is that it must agree with its antecedent in number. However, there are situations in which pronouns act as conceptual anaphors. For example, in the discourse, "I think I'll order a frozen margarita. I just love them.", the pronoun "them" does not refer to a single margarita, but perhaps all the margarltas the speaker has ever tasted. When anaphors operate in this way, they are often mismatched with their ILteral antecedent in number. Three situtations when conceptual anaphora occurs are identified: when referring to the members of a Collective Set (as opposed to the set per se), a Multiply occurring Item or Event (v/ersus a Unique Item/Event), or a Generic Type (versus a Specific Token). Two experiments are reported. The first demonstrated that subjects consider a mismatched, plural pronoun more natural than a matched, singular pronoun when it follows a Collective Set, Multiple Item/Event, or Generic Type noun. Conversely, subjects consider a matched, singular pronoun more natural when it follows an Individual Member of a set, Unique Item/Event, or Specific Token noun. The second experiment demonstrated that subjects comprehend a mismatched, plural pronoun faster than a matched, singular pronoun when it follows a Collective Set, Multiple Item/Event, or Generic Type noun, but they comprehend a matched, singular pronoun faster when it follows an Individual Member, Unique Item/Event, or Specific Token noun. This suggests that when comprehenders encounter conceptual—though mismatched anaphors—they do not have to reinstate the multiple entities into their mental representations.