Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Anaphors, such as definite noun phrases and pronouns, are important contributors to discourse coherence. Anaphora resolution is the process of determining the referent of an anaphor in a discourse or dialogue. Models of discourse and sentence comprehension have made different claims about the temporal relationship between the occurence of the syntactic and semantic analyses of the sentence and the process of anaphora resolution. The end-of-sentence hypothesis holds that anaphora resolution occurs at the end of the sentence, after the syntactic and semantic analyses are completed. The immediacy assumption holds that anaphora resolution occurs as soon.as an anaphor is encountered and is completed as m u c h as possible before further words are processed. The cognitive lag hypothesis assumes that anaphora resolution starts when the anaphor is encountered but is completed while processing further words in the sentence. A study is described that traces the activation of a referent by its anaphor over a complete sentence. It demonstrates that anaphora resolution does not await the complete syntactic and semantic interpretations of the sentence. A n anaphor starts activating its referent as soon as the anaphor is encountered and the referent stays activated until the end of the sentence. This result supports a particular version of the immediacy assumption. This is also interpreted in terms of a limited cache that stores the items currently in focus and that is updated at sentence or clause boundaries.