The present study provides converging evidence across three next-mention biases that likelihood of coreference influences the choice of referring expression: implicit causality (IC), the goal bias of transfer-of-possession (ToP) verbs, and implicit consequentiality (I-Cons). A pilot study and four experiments investigated coreference production in German using a forced-reference paradigm. The pilot study used object- and subject-biased IC verbs, showing a statistically marginal influence of next-mention bias on referential expressions, albeit mediated by grammatical function and feature overlap between antecedents. Experiment 1 focused on these features for object reference with ToP verbs, showing effects of coreference bias. In a within-participants comparison, Experiment 2 showed comparable effects for two classes of IC verbs, stimulus–experiencer and experiencer–stimulus predicates. Experiment 3 replicated and extended the IC form effects to another verb class, agent–evocator verbs. Finally, Experiment 4 revealed effects on anaphoric form also for I-Cons, while simultaneously replicating the effect observed for IC.
AbrahamW. (2003). Pronomina im Diskurs. [Anaphors in discourse]. Sprachwissenschaft, 27(4), 447–491.
2.
AhrenholzB. (2007). Verweise mit Demonstrativa im gesprochenen Deutsch: Grammatik, Zweitspracherwerb und Deutsch als Fremdsprache [Reference with demonstratives in spoken German: Grammar, second language acquisition and German as a foreign language]. De Gruyter.
ArielM. (2013). Centering, accessibility and the next mention. Theoretical Linguistics, 39, 39–58.
5.
ArnoldJ. E. (1998). Reference form and discourse patterns [PhD Thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA].
6.
ArnoldJ. E. (2001). The effect of thematic roles on pronoun use and frequency of reference continuation. Discourse Processes, 31(2), 137–162.
7.
ArnoldJ. E. (2008). Reference production: Production-internal and addressee-oriented processes. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(4), 495–527.
8.
ArnoldJ. E. (2010). How speakers refer: The role of accessibility. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(4), 187–203.
9.
ArnoldJ. E.EisenbandJ. G.Brown-SchmidtS.TrueswellJ. C. (2000). The rapid use of gender information: Evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eye tracking. Cognition, 76, B13–B26.
10.
ArnoldJ. E.GriffinZ. M. (2007). The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 521–536.
11.
ArnoldJ. E.ZerkleS. A. (2021). Why do people use pronouns? Pragmatic selection vs. rational models. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 34, 1152–1175.
12.
AsherN.LascaridesA. (2003). Logics of conversation. Cambridge University Press.
13.
AuT. K. (1986). A verb is worth a thousand words: The causes and consequences of interpersonal events implicit in language. Journal of Memory & Language, 25(1), 104–122.
14.
BatesD.MachlerM.BolkerB.WalkerS. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.
15.
BoschP.HinterwimmerS. (2016). Anaphoric reference by demonstrative pronouns in German. in search of the relevant parameters. In HollerA.SuckowK. (Eds.), Empirical perspectives on anaphora resolution (pp. 193–201). Walter de Gruyter.
16.
BoschP.KatzG.UmbachC. (2007). The non-subject bias of German demonstrative pronouns. In Schwarz-FrieselM.ConstenM.KneesM. (Eds.), Anaphors in text: Cognitive, formal and applied approaches to anaphoric reference (pp. 145–164). John Benjamins.
17.
BoschP.RozarioT.ZhaoY. (2003). Demonstrative pronouns and personal pronouns: German der vs. er. In Proceedings of the 2003 EACL workshop on the computational treatment of anaphora (pp. 61–68). https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/k.vdeemter/pages/bosch.pdf
18.
BottO.SolstadT. (2014). From verbs to discourse: A novel account of implicit causality. In Fabricius-HansenC.HemforthB.MertinsB. (Eds.), Psycholinguistic approaches to meaning and understanding across languages (pp. 213–251). Springer.
19.
BottO.SolstadT. (2021). Discourse expectations: Explaining the implicit causality biases of verbs. Linguistics, 2(59), 361–416.
20.
BrennanS. E.HannaJ. E. (2009). Partner-specific adaptation in dialog. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 274–291.
21.
BrownR.FishD. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language. Cognition, 14, 237–273.
22.
Brown-SchmidtS.ByronD. K.TanenhausM. K. (2005). Beyond salience: Interpretation of personal and demonstrative pronouns. Journal of Memory and Language, 53(2), 292–313.
23.
ChafeW. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago University Press.
24.
ClarkH. H.MurphyG. L. (1982). Audience design in meaning and reference. In NyJ. F. L.KintschW. (Eds.), Language and comprehension (pp. 287–299). North Holland.
25.
CozijnR.CommandeurE.VonkW.NoordmanL. G. (2011). The time course of the use of implicit causality information in the processing of pronouns: A visual world paradigm study. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 381–403.
26.
CrawleyR. A.StevensonR. J.KleinmanD. (1990). The use of heuristic strategies in the interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 19(4), 245–264.
27.
CrineanM.GarnhamA. (2006). Implicit causality, implicit consequentiality and semantic roles. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(5), 636–648.
28.
DegenJ.TanenhausM. K. (2015). Processing scalar implicature: A constraint-based approach. Cognitive Science, 39(4), 667–710.
29.
DiesselH. (1999). Demonstratives: Form, function and grammaticalization. John Benjamins Publishing.
30.
FerstlE. C.GarnhamA.ManouilidouC. (2011). Implicit causality bias in English: A corpus of 300 verbs. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 124–135.
31.
FettermanA. M. M.VazquezN. N.ArnoldJ. E. (2022). The effects of semantic role predictability on the production of overt pronouns in Spanish. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 51, 169–194.
32.
FletcherC. R. (1984). Markedness and topic continuity in discourse processing. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(4), 487–493.
33.
FrancikE. P. (1985). Referential choice and focus of attention in narratives [PhD Thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA].
34.
FregeG. (1892). Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift Fürphilosophie und Philosophische Kritik [On sense and denotation], 100, 25–50.
35.
FrissonS. (2009). Semantic underspecification in language processing. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 111–127.
36.
FukumuraK.HervéC.VillataS.ZhangS.FoppoloF. (2022). Representations underlying pronoun choice in Italian and English. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 75(8), 1428–1447.
37.
FukumuraK.HyönäJ.ScholfieldM. (2013). Gender affects semantic competition: The effect of gender in a non-gendermarking language. Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition, 39, 1012–1021.
FukumuraK.Van GompelR. P. (2010). Choosing anaphoric expressions: Do people take into account likelihood of reference?Journal of Memory and Language, 62(1), 52–66.
40.
FukumuraK.van GompelR. P.HarleyT.PickeringM. J. (2011). How does similarity-based interference affect the choice of referring expression?Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 331–344.
41.
FukumuraK.van GompelR. P. G. (2012). Producing pronouns and definite noun phrases: Do speakers use the addressee’s discourse model?Cognitive Science, 36(7), 1289–1311.
42.
FukumuraK.van GompelR. P. G.PickeringM. J. (2010). The use of visual context during the production of referring expressions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1700–1715.
43.
GarnhamA. (2001). Mental models and the interpretation of anaphora. Psychology Press.
44.
GarnhamA.ChildS.HuttonS. (2020). Anticipating causes and consequences. Journal of Memory and Language, 114, 104130.
45.
GarnhamA.TraxlerM.OakhillJ.GernsbacherM. A. (1996). The locus of implicit causality effects in comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 517–543.
46.
GarnhamA.VorthmannS.KaplanovaK. (2020). Implicit consequentiality bias in English: A corpus of 300+ verbs. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 1530–1550.
47.
GarveyC.CaramazzaA. (1974). Implicit causality in verbs. Linguistic Inquiry, 5(3), 459–464.
48.
GernsbacherM. A.HargreavesD.BeemanM. (1989). Building and accessing clausal representations: The advantage of first mention versus the advantage of clause recency. Journal of Memory & Language, 28, 735–755.
49.
GivόnT. (1983). Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In GivόnT. (Ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study linguistics (pp. 1–41). John Benjamins.
50.
GivόnT. (1992) The grammar of referential coreference as mental processing instructions. Linguistics, 30, 5–55.
51.
GordonP. C.GroszB. J.GilliomL. A. (1993). Pronouns, names, and the centering of attention in discourse. Cognitive Science, 17(3), 311–347.
52.
GriceH. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In ColeP.MorganJ. L. (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press.
53.
GroszB. J.WeinsteinS.JoshiA. K. (1995). Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2), 203–225.
54.
GundelJ.HedbergN.ZacharskyR. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69(2), 274–307.
55.
HartshorneJ. K.O’DonnellT. J.TenenbaumJ. B. (2015). The causes and consequences explicit in verbs. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(6), 716–734.
56.
HartshorneJ. K.SnedekerJ. (2013). Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(10), 1474–1508.
57.
HornL. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, 11, 42.
58.
HornL. R. (2004). Implicature. In HornL. R.WardG. (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 3–28). Blackwell.
59.
HortonW. S.GerrigR. J. (2002). Speakers’ experiences and audience design: Knowing when and knowing how to adjust utterances to addressees. Journal of Memory and Language, 47(4), 589–606.
60.
HuangY. (1994). The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora: A study with special reference to Chinese. Cambridge University Press.
61.
HwangH. (2021). Avoidance of gender-ambiguous pronouns as a consequence of ambiguity-avoidance strategy. Discourse Processes, 3(58), 251–259.
62.
JaegerT. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 434–446.
63.
JärvikiviJ.van GompelR. P. G.HyönäJ. (2017). The interplay of implicit causality, structural heuristics, and anaphor type in ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46(3), 525–550.
64.
KaiserE. (2010). Investigating the consequences of focus on the production and comprehension of referring expressions. International Review of Pragmatics, 2(2), 266–297.
65.
KaiserE. (2011a). On the relation between coherence relations and anaphoric demonstratives in German. Proceedings of Sinn & Bedeutung, 15, 337–351.
66.
KaiserE. (2011b). Salience and contrast effects in reference resolution: The interpretation of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(10), 1587–1624.
67.
KaiserE. (2013). Looking beyond personal pronouns and beyond English: Typological and computational complexity in reference resolution. Theoretical Linguistics, 39(1–2), 109–122.
KaiserE.LiD. C. H.HolsingerE. (2011). Exploring the lexical and acoustic consequences of referential predictability. In HendrickxI.DeviS. LalithaBrancoA.MitkovR. (Eds.), Discourse anaphora and anaphor resolution colloquium (pp. 171–183). Springer.
70.
KaiserE.TrueswellJ. C. (2004). The referential properties of Dutch pronouns and demonstratives: Is salience enough?Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 8, 137–149.
71.
KaiserE.TrueswellJ. C. (2008). Interpreting pronouns and demonstratives in Finnish: Evidence for a form-specific approach to reference resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(5), 709–748.
72.
KantolaL.van GompelR. P. G. (2016). Is anaphoric reference cooperative?The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(6), 1109–1128.
73.
Karmiloff-SmithA. (1985). Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1, 61–85.
74.
KehlerA. (2002). Coherence, reference, and the theory of grammar. CSLI Publications.
75.
KehlerA.KertzL.RohdeH.ElmanJ. L. (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics, 25(1), 1–44.
76.
KehlerA.RohdeH. (2013). A probabilistic reconciliation of coherence-driven and centering-driven theories of pronoun interpretation. Theoretical Linguistics, 39(1–2), 1–37.
77.
KehlerA.RohdeH. (2019). Prominence and coherence in a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation. Journal of Pragmatics, 154, 63–78.
KoornneefA. W.van BerkumJ. J. A. (2006). On the use of verb-based implicit causality in sentence comprehension: Evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 445–465.
80.
LappinS.LeassH. J. (1994). An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution. Computational Linguistics, 20, 535–561.
81.
LenerzJ. (1977). Zur Abfolge nominaler Satzglieder im Deutschen [On the order of nominal constituents in German]. Narr.
82.
LevinsonS. C. (1987). Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics, 23(2), 379–434.
83.
LevinsonS. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press.
84.
MayolL. (2018). Asymmetries between interpretation and production in Catalan pronouns. Discourse and Dialogue, 2(9), 1–34.
85.
McKoonG.GreeneS. B.RatcliffR. (1993). Discourse models, pronoun resolution, and the implicit causality of verbs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 1040–1052.
PatilU.BoschP.HinterwimmerS. (2020). Constraints on German diese demonstratives: language formality and subject-avoidance. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5(1), 14.
88.
PickeringM. J.GarrodS. (2007). Do people use language production to make predictions during comprehension?Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(3), 105–110.
89.
PickeringM. J.MajidA. (2007). What are implicit causality and consequentiality?Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(5), 780–788.
90.
PoesioM.SturtP.ArtsteinR.FilikR. (2006). Underspecification and anaphora: Theoretical issues and preliminary evidence. Discourse Processes, 42(2), 157–175.
91.
PorteleY.BaderM. (2016). Accessibility and referential choice: Personal pronouns and d-pronouns in written German. Discours. Revue De Linguistique, Psycholinguistique Et Informatique, 18, 1–41.
92.
PorteleY.BaderM. (2020). Coherence and the interpretation of personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. In HollerA.SuckowK.de la FuenteI. (Eds.), Information structuring in discourse (pp. 24–55). Brill.
93.
PykkönenP.Järvikivi, (2010). Activation and persistence of implicit causality information in spoken language comprehension. Experimental Psychology, 57(1), 5–16.
94.
R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
95.
RohdeH. (2008). Coherence-driven effects in sentence and discourse processing [PhD Thesis, University of California, San Diego].
96.
RohdeH.KehlerA. (2014). Grammatical and information-structural influences on pronoun production. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(8), 912–927.
RosaE. C.ArnoldJ. E. (2017). Predictability affects anaphoric form: Thematic roles can affect reference form selection. Journal of Memory and Language, 94, 43–60.
99.
RudolphU.FörsterlingF. (1997). The psychological causality implicit in verbs: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 121(2), 192–218.
100.
RussellB. (1905). On denoting. Mind, 14(4), 479–493.
101.
SchumacherP. B.BackhausJ.DanglM. (2015). Backward-and forward-looking potential of anaphors. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1746.
102.
SchumacherP. B.RobertsL.JarvikiviJ. (2017). Agentivity drives real-time pronoun resolution: Evidence from German er and der. Lingua, 185, 25–41.
103.
SearleJ. R. (1669). Speech acts. Cambridge University Press.
104.
SingmannH.BolkerB.WestfallJ.AustF.Ben-ShacharM. S. (2021). afex: Analysis of factorial experiments (R package version 0.28-1). https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=afex
105.
SmythR. (1994). Grammatical determinants of ambiguous pronoun resolution. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23, 197–229.
106.
SolstadT.BottO. (2022). On the nature of implicit causality and consequentiality: The case of psychological verbs. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 37, 1311–1340.
107.
StevensonR. J.CrawleyR. A.KleinmanD. (1994). Thematic roles, focus and the representation of events. Language and Cognitive Processes, 9, 473–592.
108.
StewartA. J.PickeringM. J.SanfordA. J. (1998). Implicit consequentiality. In GernsbacherS. J.DerryM. A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th annual conference of the cognitive science society (pp. 1031–1036). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
109.
StewartA. J.PickeringM. J.SanfordA. J. (2000). The time course of the influence of implicit causality information: Focusing versus integration accounts. Journal of Memory and Language, 42(3), 423–443.
110.
TemmeA. (2018). The peculiar nature of psych verbs and experiencer object structures [PhD thesis, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin].
111.
van BerkumJ. J. A.KoornneefA. W.OttenM.NieuwlandM. S. (2007). Establishing reference in language comprehension: An electrophysiological perspective. Brain Research, 1146, 158–171.
112.
VerhoevenE. (2014). Thematic prominence and animacy asymmetries. evidence from a cross-linguistic production study. Lingua, 143, 129–161.
113.
WeatherfordK. C.ArnoldJ. E. (2021). Semantic predictability of implicit causality can affect referential form choice. Cognition, 214, 104759.
114.
ZhanM.LevyR.KehlerA. (2020). Pronoun interpretation in Mandarin Chinese follows principles of Bayesian inference. PLOS ONE, 8(15), e0237012.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
