For more than three decades, research into the psycholinguistics of pronoun interpretation has argued that hearers use various interpretation 'preferences' or 'strategies' that are associated with specific linguistic properties of antecedent expressions. This focus is a departure from the type of approach outlined in Hobbs (1979), who argues that the mechanisms supporting pronoun interpretation are driven predominantly by semantics, world knowledge and inference, with particular attention to how these are used to establish the coherence of a discourse. On the basis of three new experimental studies, we evaluate a coherence-driven analysis with respect to four previously proposed interpretation biases-based on grammatical role parallelism, thematic roles, implicit causality, and subjecthood-and argue that the coherence-driven analysis can explain the underlying source of the biases and predict in what contexts evidence for each will surface. The results further suggest that pronoun interpretation is incrementally influenced by probabilistic expectations that hearers have regarding what coherence relations are likely to ensue, together with their expectations about what entities will be mentioned next, which, crucially, are conditioned on those coherence relations.

A standard assumption in psycholinguistic research on pronoun interpretation is that production and interpretation are guided by the same set of contextual factors. A line of recent research has suggested otherwise, however, arguing instead that pronoun production is insensitive to a class of semantically-driven contextual biases that have been shown to influence pronoun interpretation. The work reported in this paper addresses three fundamental questions that have been left unresolved by this research. First, research demonstrating the insensitivity of production to semantic biases has relied on referentially-unambiguous settings in which the comprehender's ability to resolve the pronoun is not actually at stake. Experiment 1, a story continuation study, demonstrates that pronoun production is also insensitive to semantic biases in settings in which a pronoun would be referentially ambiguous. Second, previous research has not distinguished between accounts in which production biases are driven by grammatical properties of intended referents (e.g., subject position) or by information-structural factors (specifically, topichood) that are inherently pragmatic in nature. Experiment 2 examines this question with a story continuation study that manipulates the likelihood of potential referents being the topic while keeping grammatical role constant. A significant effect of the manipulation on rate of pronominalization supports the claim that pronoun production is influenced by the likelihood that the referent is the current topic. Lastly, the predictions of Kehler et al.'s (2008) Bayesian analysis of the relationship between production and interpretation has never been quantitatively examined. The results of both experiments are shown to support the analysis over two competing models.

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We show that comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined readers’ expectations for high/low relative clause attachments following implicit-causality and non-implicit-causality verbs (John detests/babysits the children of the musician who…). In the off-line study, the widely reported low-attachment preference for English is observed in the non-implicit causality condition, but this preference gives way to more high attachments in the implicit causality condition in cases in which (i) the verb’s causally implicated referent occupies the high-attachment position and (ii) the relative clause provides an explanation for the event described by the matrix clause (e.g., …who are arrogant and rude). In the on-line study, a similar preference for high attachment emerges in the implicit causality context—crucially, before the occurrence of any linguistic evidence that the RC does in fact provide an explanation—whereas the low-attachment preference is consistent elsewhere. These findings constitute the first demonstration that expectations about ensuing discourse coherence relationships can elicit full reversals in syntactic attachment preferences, and that these discourse-level expectations can affect on-line disambiguation as rapidly as lexical and morphosyntactic cues.

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