Towards a psychological basis for a theory of anaphora - Centre for ...

it makes it clear that the differences between older and
younger children in this domain do not reflect
qualitative differences in processing strategies. The
five year-olds' poorer performance in the pronoun
condition si~nply reflects
ability to exploit all of
a developmental 1aq in the
the weighting information
carried by a pronoun.
We note, finally, that the present account also
accomodates a number of otherwise puzzling observations
we have made about the on-line interpretability of
anaphor ic pronouns in natural conversational discourse
(Marslen-Wilson, Levy, & Tyler, in preparation),
Although adult speakers produce a high proportion of
pronoun anaphors in such a way that they are, in
principle, immediately resolvable (given their lexical
and configurational properties), there are also numerous
exceptions. First, and consistent with our proposals
above, there are pronouns which are lexically and
configurationally ambiguous between more than one
potential antecedent, and where the properties
predicated of the pronouns by the rest of the utterance
provide inferential disambiguation. Second, and most
significant for the present argument, there are some
cases where the
clearly imply a
lexical properties of the pronoun
particular antecedent, but where the
subsequent properties predicated of the pronoun are
pragmatically incompatible with this antecedent, and
point to a quite different one [10].
If lexical variables were operating in a context of
all-or-'none selection, then one would expect cases of
this type to produce "garden-path" effects in the
l istener. But, in informal observation, we have noticed
no such efEects. In fact, we only detected these cases
in the first place as the result of asystematic
analysis of the on-line interpretability of each pronoun
anaphor in the discourse. S£ one listens to the
discourse normally, then theso "violations" slip by
without causing any apparent perturbations. This is
difficult to explain unless one assumes that the
listener can indeed carry along multiple interpretative
hypotheses, and may delay committment to any single one
of these until pragmatic inferencing, relative to the
discourse and the world, confirms one particular
assigment and rules out any others.
If this analysis is correct, then the results of
the present lexical decision experiment can be taken at
their face value - namely, as reflecting the multiple
detfvation of potential antoccdonts, Tho lcxical
constraints carried by the pronoun here did not lead to
an immediate all-or-none choice of a single antecedent,
but only to a weighting in favour of one of the two
antecedents being actively considered. It remains to be
seen in future experiments whether discourse structural