We tested a cue-based retrieval model that predicts how similarity between discourse entities influences the speaker's choice of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, speakers produced fewer pronouns (relative to repeated noun phrases) when the competitor was in the same situation as the referent (both on a horse) rather than in a different…

Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children.…

A prominent antecedent facilitates anaphor resolution. Speed-accuracy tradeoff modeling in Experiments 1 and 3 indicated that clefting did not affect the speed of accessing an antecedent representation, which is inconsistent with claims that discourse-focused information is actively maintained in focal attention [e.g., Gundel, J. K. (1999). "On…