Comprehension of referring expressions in Chinese

Studies of English have shown that reduced referential expressions (e.g. pr onouns) contribute more to discourse coherence than do unreduced expression s (e.g. proper names). To test the generality of these findings, a series o f reading-time studies was conducted to examine the processing of co-refere nce in Chinese discourse. The results obtained for Chinese were similar to those obtained previously for English. Furthermore, comparisons of the comp rehension of overt pronouns and zero pronouns (a phologically-null form not present in English) showed that the two types of reduced referring express ions contribute equally to discourse coherence for the kinds of passages st udied in the experiments, A formal model of the structure and processing of reference in discourse, developed to handle co-reference phenomena in Engl ish, is shown to provide an account of these experimental results on the re ading of Chinese.