EXPRESS: The Production of Referring Expressions is Influenced by the Likelihood of Next Mention.

Abstract

The present study provides converging evidence across three next-mention biases that likelihood of coreference influences the choice of referring expression: Implicit Causality (IC), the goal bias of Transfer-of-Possession verbs, and Implicit Consequentiality. A pilot study and four experiments investigated coreference production in German using a forced-reference paradigm (Fukumura and van Gompel 2010). The pilot study used object- and subject-biased IC verbs, showing a statistically marginal influence of next-mention bias on referential expressions, albeit mediated by grammatical function and feature overlap between antecedents. Experiment 1 focused on these features for object reference with Transfer-of-Possession verbs (Rosa and Arnold 2017), showing effects of coreference bias. In a within- participants comparison, Experiment 2 showed comparable effects for two classes of IC verbs, stimulus-experiencer and experiencer-stimulus predicates. Experiment 3 replicated and extended the IC form effects to another verb class, agent-evocator verbs. Finally, Experiment 4 revealed effects on anaphoric form also for Implicit Consequentiality, while simultaneously replicating the effect observed for IC.