PRONOMINALIZATION AND DISCOURSE COHERENCE, DISCOURSE STRUCTURE AND PRONOUN INTERPRETATION

Two self-paced reading-time experiments are reported that examine the time course of pronoun interpretation processes based on local discour se structure and on world knowledge. The characterization of local dis course structure is based on recent work on centering, which provides a specific formulation of how the ways in which sentences make referen ce to common entities determines the coherence of discourse segments a nd how discourse structure influences interpretation of ambiguous pron ouns. The results of the first experiment show that readers generate a default interpretation of a pronoun based on features of local discou rse structure, and that that default interpretation is later confirmed or overridden by knowledge-based processes. The results of the second experiment show that local discourse structure continues to influence pronoun interpretation even when the semantic information that ultima tely compels interpretation occurs before the pronoun. These results s upport the view that processes acting on local discourse structure pla y a powerful role in guiding language comprehension.