PRONOUN RESOLUTION WITHOUT PRONOUNS - SOME CONSEQUENCES OF MEMORY-BASED TEXT-PROCESSING

A memory-based processing approach to discourse comprehension emphasiz es the rapid deployment of information in memory to facilitate underst anding of the text that is currently being read. S. B. Greene, R. J. G errig, G. McKoon, and R. Ratcliff (1994) demonstrated that when a text described the reunion of 2 characters who had previously discussed a 3rd character, the accessibility of the 3rd character increased, and t he use of an unheralded pronoun (R. J. Gerrig, 1986) to refer to that character was felicitous. fn experiments in this article, the authors demonstrate that concepts related to the referent of the unheralded pr onoun also increase in accessibility and that those concepts form asso ciations in memory with concepts present in the discourse at the time the pronoun is used. The authors also show that the increase in access ibility for the referent of the pronoun, as well as the appropriate lo ng-term memory associations, occurs even in the absence of the pronoun .