Discourse Structure and Anaphora: Some Experimental Results
Max Coltheart · 2016
In the process of comprehending language, people can ultimately bring to bear all their cognitive resources and all their linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge. Nonetheless, careful examination of how a variety of linguistic devices are used in language comprehension has pointed to the existence of specialised processors that seem to operate very quickly and on the basis of far less than all the relevant information (cf. Frazier, 1985; Frazier, this volume; and Clifton & Frazier, in press, for reviews; cf. Fodor, 1983, for a general theoretical perspective). The present paper begins to examine how pronouns (and, secondarily, NP anaphors) are processed, in an effort to determine whether any interesting linguistic specialisations exist for them.