Effects of anaphoric dependencies and semantic representations on pronoun interpretation

Abstract

We describe three experiments that use priming methodology to investigate the nature of the abstract mental representations activated during pronoun resolution, in order to contribute to our understanding of how structural representations and semantic coherence representations influence pronoun interpretation. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that there exists a level of abstract anaphoric dependency representations. Experiments 2 and 3 indicate that general coherence representations are activated during pronoun interpretation and thus provide direct evidence for the existence of shared abstract representations between (non-pronominal) coherence-related inferencing and pronoun resolution processes. Moreover, Experiment 3 has implications for our understanding of the connections between linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive processes. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.