Understanding anaphors in story dialogue

Previous research has identified two processes that play an important role in anaphor resolution. An activation process increases the accessibility of an anaphor's referent; a suppression process diminishes the accessibility of its nonreferents. In this study, we examined how these processes operate when reference to two story characters shifts rapidly, as it does in story dialogue. Dialogue raises interesting questions about how the antecedent o f an anaphor becomes the most activated entity in the reader's discourse mo del. Do readers suppress an anaphor's nonreferent even though that same ent ity is likely to be the referent of a subsequent anaphor? Are activation an d suppression processes triggered by the anaphor itself or by cues that sig nal a change of speaker? We found that an anaphor's antecedent is activated differently in dialogue than it is elsewhere in a narrative. Our results s uggest that readers use knowledge about the structure of dialogue to antici pate the referent of an upcoming anaphor.