Does Pronoun Resolution Incorporate Antecedent Semantics
Tiana V. Simovic · TSpace (University of Toronto) · 2020
Pronouns (she, they, ...) are semantically underspecified and convey minimal information about their intended referents. Their interpretation is often described in relation to mental models that encode possible referents. On classic memory reinstatement accounts, this process involves "reactivating" a pronoun’s antecedent. Contemporary work adopts an indexical approach, combining referential interpretation with attentional binding. Here, the pronoun acts as a cue to directly refer to an attentionally restricted candidate. The current study explored a key element of the indexical account, namely whether there is any processing relationship between an antecedent expression’s semantics and a subsequent coreferential pronoun. To assess this, the task involved novel situations where unfolding actions entailed that a previous description for an object was or was not viable at the point when a subsequent pronoun was encountered. The results demonstrate that pronouns have indexical meaning and are not mediated by activating antecedent semantics in memory representations.