Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments explore how pronoun resolution is influenced by a) properties of discourse referents, specifically whether they are underspecified and in need of description, and b) the contribution of the pronoun-containing utterance, specifically whether it provides a description or specifies an event. W e find that these factors interact, such that when an underspecified referent is in focus, reading is facilitated for description continuations, but when a specified referent is in focus, reading is facilitated in event continuations when the specified referent continues as the topic. This study reveals one of the complex interactions that underlies pronoun resolution.