Comprehending referential expressions during reading: Evidence from eye tracking

Abstract

Two eye‐tracking experiments investigated how referential expressions, consisting of proper names and pronouns, influence reading comprehension. Experiment 1 showed that repeated names caused elevated reading times compared to pronouns, a finding that has been called the repeated‐name penalty in studies using self‐paced reading (Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993). Consistent with these previous studies, Experiment 1 also showed that the repeated‐name penalty occurs for syntactic subjects that corefer with the subject of the preceding sentence, but does not occur for direct objects that corefer with an object of the preceding sentence. These results further serve to localize the repeated‐name penalty within the sentence and to show that it can be associated with an increase in the frequency of regressive saccades out of the text region beyond the repeated name. Experiment 2 showed that the repeated‐name penalty was modulated not only by syntactic factors within a sentence but also by the relationship between successive sentences in a discourse. The results of these experiments provide strong support for the centering theory of discourse and related approaches to the processing of referential and coreferential expressions.