Tracking of Referents in Discourse: Automated versus Attended Processes

摘要

The cognitive processes involved in achieving the overall coherence of discourse are central to an understanding of the use of natural language in communication. The present series of studies examines the mental effort involved in achieving coreference. We explore a major factor that affects the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices in discourse have shown a correlation between the type of device (e.g. full noun).