Evidence for an anaphoric mechanism within syntactic processing: Some reference relations defy semantic and pragmatic constraints

Abstract

In three experiments, we examined an interaction between the pronoun they and syntactic analysis. Experiment 1 demonstrates that they can slow reading times to is when this verb is visually presented immediately after a sentence fragment ending with an ambiguous expression such as flying kites. This effect seems to involve a coreference assignment linking they and the ambiguous expression that influences the syntactic analysis of the latter. Experiments 2 and 3 show that this effect can operate even when coreference between they and the ambiguous expression is implausible. These results support a modular theory of comprehension that includes structurally oriented reference processes with access to some, but not all, of the listener's knowledge relevant to coreference. © 1987 Psychonomic Society, Inc.