PROCESSES INVOLVED IN THE RESOLUTION OF EXPLICIT ANAPHORS

Two experiments were conducted to examine the processes involved in th e reactivation of antecedents in response to explicit anaphors (i.e., anaphors that are both lexically and conceptually identical to an ante cedent). Participants read passages containing anaphors that were eith er lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent, or pas sages containing anaphors that were lexically identical to but concept ually different from a target antecedent. Experiment 1 demonstrated th at explicit anaphors only reactivate target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent. Howe ver, as the distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. In Ex periment 2, an adjective modifier was added to the anaphoric noun phra se, which increased the degree of featural overlap between the anaphor ic noun phrase and the target antecedent. With the added information i n the anaphoric noun phrase, distant antecedents that were not reactiv ated in Experiment 1 were reactivated. Results are discussed in terms of antecedent reactivation occurring through a fast-acting passive res onance process.