DISCOURSE MODELS, PRONOUN RESOLUTION, AND THE IMPLICIT CAUSALITY OF VERBS

Some interpersonal verbs, such as admire and amaze, describe an action or property of one person (the reactor) that is necessarily a respons e to an action or property of another (the initiator). We hypothesized that these verbs make the initiator relatively more accessible in a c omprehender's discourse model and that this change in relative accessi bility aids identification of the referent of a pronoun in a subsequen t because clause. We predicted that, as a result, subjects would be fa ster to recognize a character's name after a because clause that uses a pronoun to refer to that character than after one that refers to som e other character. Four experiments confirmed this prediction. Three f urther experiments demonstrated the importance of the verb's causal st ructure and of the presence of the connective because to this result.