Processing pronouns with real-world referents: An electrophysiological investigation

Investigations of coreferential processing typically require participants to link anaphors with semantically underspecified (“empty”) discourse entities. However, outside the laboratory, anaphors often refer to people, objects, or events about which we possess extensive background knowledge. In addition, recent evidence indicates that comprehenders experience processing difficulty when sentence characters are semantically similar. In the current study we examined whether activating pre-existing real-world knowledge about antecedents influenced coreferential processing in a developing sentence context. Event-related potentials were recorded as participants read sentences containing ambiguous pronouns. Antecedents were either “empty” or were real, well-known individuals. In addition, pronouns either matched or mismatched the sex of their antecedents. Mismatching anaphors elicited a P600 effect whose amplitude was significantly greater when sentence characters were real. Moreover, matching pronouns elicited a P600-like effect when their antecedents were semantically “empty”. Our results suggest that the presence of high-quality representations in a discourse model facilitates coreferential processing.