Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The aim of this study was to distinguish between two heuristic strategies proposed to account for the assignment of ambiguous pronouns: a subject assignment strategy and a parallel function strategy. According to the subject assignment strategy a pronoun is assigned to a preceding subject noun phrase, whereas according to the parallel function strategy a pronoun is assigned to a previous noun phrase with the same grammatical function. These two strategies were tested by examining the interpretation of ambiguous subject and non-subject pronouns. There was a strong preference for assigning both types of pronouns to preceding subject noun phrases which supported the subject assignment strategy. However the preference was reduced for non-subject pronouns compared to subject pronouns which we interpreted as evidence for grammatical parallelism. A subsidiary aim of the study was to investigate text-level effects of order-of-mention where a pronoun is assigned to a noun phrase which has been mentioned in the szmne sequential position. We did not observe any strong effects although we did observe a possible topic assignment strategy where topic-hood depended on order-ofmention. A post hoc inspection of the materials revealed possible effects of intra-sentential order-of-mention parallelism. We conclude that a subject assignment strategy, a parallel grammatical function strategy, a topic assignment strategy and a parallel order-of-mention strategy m a y all constrain the interpretation of ambiguous subject and non-subject pronouns.