A. Garnham et al., THE INTERPRETATION OF ANAPHORIC NOUN PHRASES - TIME-COURSE, AND EFFECTS OF OVERSPECIFICITY, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 50(1), 1997, pp. 149-162
Two experiments investigated the interpretation of anaphoric noun phra
ses, and in particular those that could only be linked to their antece
dents via knowledge-based inferences. The first experiment showed that
much of the inferential processing was carried out as the anaphoric n
oun phrase was read, although there was some indication that inferenti
al processing continued to the end of the clause. The second experimen
t attempted to establish why anaphoric noun phrases that are more spec
ific than their antecedents cause problems. It showed that the difficu
lty did not lie in adding the extra information carried by the anaphor
to the representation of the referent. Rather, we suggest, putting ex
tra information in the anaphoric noun phrase disrupts the process of l
inking that noun phrase to its antecedent.