GRAMMATICAL DETERMINANTS OF AMBIGUOUS PRONOUN RESOLUTION

Crawley et al. (1990) argue for the primacy of a 'subject assignment' strategy for pronoun assignment during reading, and against the notion of 'parallel function' (Sheldon, 1974). However, most of their items deviated from parallel structure, and none included subject pronouns. In four experiments with subject and nonsubject pronouns, strong paral lel function effects emerge when a potential antecedent has the same s yntactic role as the pronoun and when the two clauses have the same at tachment site and constituent structure. Attachment nonparallelism cau ses the greatest ambiguity, while the other types lead to more subject assignment overall, although there is always an overlaid parallel fun ction effect. These observations support a model of pronoun assignment according to which potential antecedents are checked for morphologica l, syntactic and semantic feature matches with the pronoun, and primin g/reactivation of syntactic structure across clauses facilitates paral lel assignment.